Making a World after Empire — 2010 ·

The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

Edited by Christopher J. Lee

“This important collection of essays points to a phenomenon that has been lost in the common assumption of a worldwide movement from colonial empires to nation-states: the richer imagination of people in those empires and their quest for alternative modes of political connection.”

Frederick Cooper — author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History

“(Making a World after Empire) is a welcome addition to the literature on the Bandung Conference.”

Tan See Seng — Comparativ

“This is a very readable and useful collection of essays shaped around the ideals and challenges that formed the 'Bandung Spirit.' The publisher, Ohio University Press, permitted inclusion of both a combined bibliography and a cumulative index, rather a rarity amongst anthologies these days. It should be of greatest interest to collections on development politics, the modern Global South, international relations, post-colonial studies, and modern Asian and African studies.”

Canadian Journal of History

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In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference's importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull

Christopher J. Lee is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.