4 - Africa-Asia Relations 70 years after Bandung: from solidarity to (sub)imperialist relations?

Presentation Abstract
The Asian-African Conference (the real name for the Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia from April 18 to 24, 1955) came to be heralded as a turning point for remaking the then existing imperial world order into a just and equitable one. African and Asian territories and nation-states that had previously or were still engaged in liberation and self-determination struggles in a Western dominated world order signaled with the Bandung Conference their desire to work together for a new world in which their cultural, political and economic interests will be recognized and actualized. The final communique issued on April 24, 1955, vigorously and actively reflected this sentiment which I will describe as expressions of Afro-Asian solidarity. Drawing on the literature on solidarity from Akan thought, through Marxist interpretations to Arendtian reflections and bringing these in dialectical engagement with selected key issues in contemporary (in the era of neoliberal capitalism) Africa-Asia relations and the history of the Bandung Conference, the case will be made that this putative solidarity was at best superficial from the onset and that subimperialist(which was all along inchoate) tendencies have arguably come to define and best describe the ongoing interactions.