After Empire Must Come Nation?

During the last two decades a revisionist wave has gripped the historiography about imperial breakups. A venerable topic at least since World War I, generations of historians strove to explain why multinational empires crumbled to give way to nation-states. The entire…

Afro-Asian Threads: Batik and African Print-Fashion, from Vlisco to Mandela

The ‘Other’ Bandung

Historians everywhere view the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference as the starting point for Afro-Asianism. The conference has become such a byword for Afro-Asian solidarity that the simple invocation of ‘Bandung’, the city in which it was held, conjures up familiar images of the leaders of newly…

The Many Names of Tan Malaka

Tan Malaka was a man of many talents. In the course of a fairly brief lifetime, lasting only a little over…

Ghana’s Bandung moment: Jim Markham’s Asian sojourn, 1953–55

The Art of Peace in the Early Cold War

In June 1952, Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi became the Vice-Chairman of the All-India Peace…

Losing lived Afro-Asianism: Kenneth Kaunda and Rambhai Patel

The Lotus Prize for Afro-Asian Literature (1969–1988)

Switch-cities, decolonization, and globalization: Singapore, Beirut, Dakar