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Theme: 11. ‘Pan-Africanism’, ‘Bandung Spirit’, ‘Global South’ Futures and the New World Order
Anandita Bajpai
Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany
Anandita Bajpai
Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany
Maria Ketzmerick
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany
Anandita Bajpai
Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany
Maria Ketzmerick
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Germany
Nico Putz
Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Germany
Tamalika Roy
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, India
This panel aims to historically trace the legacies of the ‘Bandung spirit’ and Afro-Asian pasts of the global Cold War. In focus are actors, practices and their everyday sites of interaction. The Cold War’s ambit of influence extended far beyond the geographical bounds of Euro-America and the Soviet Union. Recent research has taken note of voices from Africa and Asia, yet little is known about their interconnections. Overlooking these has given us a one-sided picture of the Cold War in which the ‘global South’ only appears as a theatre of ‘bloc’ politics. The panel proposes to fill this gap by critically engaging with the lived world(s) of African and Asian actors and their interconnections, to show how these were embedded in, but also, how they shaped the global Cold War.
Overcoming rigid territorial boundaries, it looks at sites which were geographically based both in the two power ‘blocs’ as well as in the global South. Critically following actors’ trajectories and practices, the papers will go beyond the analyses of state programmatics, institutions and discourses, which have dominated Cold War research. The aim is to explore the scope and extent of South-South connections and how they were ‘crafted’ through material, symbolic and everyday practices during the Cold War. In order to understand the complexity of contemporary South-South engagements, it is crucial to cast a new lens on their pre-history. The Cold War period offers several important points of entry into these pre-histories, when projects of decolonization, anti-imperialism, and non-alignment brought actors from the two continents together in their visions of the emerging global architecture(s). While underlining these projects, the papers in the panel are also careful not to approach entanglements as a set of romanticized solidarity networks. An unavoidable element is how historical interconnections have not obliterated discourses of otherness and racial profiling. The panel aims to trace the lived (dis)entangled everyday lives of Afro-Asian actors by focusing on four kinds of Cold War actors and sites: (1) Students’ Networks; (2) Women's Networks; (3) Media Entanglements enabled by international radio broadcasting; and (4) Afro-Asian entanglements in the divided Cold War city of Berlin. Papers will combine extensive archival research and oral history as methodology. Oral testimonies by actors today will enable us to delve into how ‘Global South’ futures were envisioned by actors, how they experienced the Cold War, and also how they utilized them to engineer their own postcolonial futures.
Panel supported by: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
Presenter: Anandita Bajpai – Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient
Presenter: Maria Ketzmerick – Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Presenter: Nico Putz – Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History
Presenter: Tamalika Roy – Jawaharlal Nehru University, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient