Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian solidarity? Africa's 'Bandung moment' in 1950s Asia. / McCann, Gerard.
In: Journal of World History, Vol. 30, No. 1-2, 01.06.2019, p. 89-123.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian solidarity? Africa's 'Bandung moment' in 1950s Asia
AU - McCann, Gerard
N1 - This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.
PY - 2019/6/1
Y1 - 2019/6/1
N2 - Africans are staged but not often heard in discussions of the ‘Bandung moment’, a high-watermark of decolonial possibility and Afro-Asian connection. This article foregrounds the agency and perspectives of African activists who travelled across Asia in the 1950s. In Delhi, Rangoon and Bandung, Africans engaged, co-produced and made useable the dialogical Afro-Asian world to deconstruct colonialism and engineer alternative futures. The piece tracks these dynamics through three interlocked arenas of Afro-Asian affinity: journeys of African students to India from the 1940s; African participation in the Asian Socialist Conference in Burma, 1953–1956, and, as the geographies of Afro-Asianism shifted, radicalized and splintered, African activism within the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization in Cairo from 1957. It reveals how the overlapping internationalisms of these fora reinforced a dyad of anti-colonial politics and development in the construction of African nationhood and pan-African community. This article breaks new ground in privileging the Afro in Afro-Asian.
AB - Africans are staged but not often heard in discussions of the ‘Bandung moment’, a high-watermark of decolonial possibility and Afro-Asian connection. This article foregrounds the agency and perspectives of African activists who travelled across Asia in the 1950s. In Delhi, Rangoon and Bandung, Africans engaged, co-produced and made useable the dialogical Afro-Asian world to deconstruct colonialism and engineer alternative futures. The piece tracks these dynamics through three interlocked arenas of Afro-Asian affinity: journeys of African students to India from the 1940s; African participation in the Asian Socialist Conference in Burma, 1953–1956, and, as the geographies of Afro-Asianism shifted, radicalized and splintered, African activism within the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization in Cairo from 1957. It reveals how the overlapping internationalisms of these fora reinforced a dyad of anti-colonial politics and development in the construction of African nationhood and pan-African community. This article breaks new ground in privileging the Afro in Afro-Asian.
U2 - 10.1353/jwh.2019.0014
DO - 10.1353/jwh.2019.0014
M3 - Article
VL - 30
SP - 89
EP - 123
JO - Journal of World History
JF - Journal of World History
SN - 1045-6007
IS - 1-2
ER -