"The People's Bandung": Local Anti-imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage

a contemporary eye atleast-they were not sodissimilaras eventscentered on promoting decolonization and combating old and new forms of imperialism.The questionofhow different Afro-Asianismsrelated toeach other, however, touches on a historiographical discussion that has picked up steam from the "Bandung at 50" celebrations in 2005. In Little Histories, Jamie Mackie argues that Bandung generated Afro-Asian enthusiasm, but no concrete follow-up meetings. 6 While true in a strict sense-the Bandung powers never again reconvened in the same configuration as an official "Asian-African Conference"-and while Bandung was an important precursor to the Non-Aligned Movement, Afro-Asianism and non-alignment cannot be conflated. Moreover, many subsequent Afro-Asian gatherings did not convene diplomats or heads of state, and therefore inhabited a different international space. Christopher Lee has taken a different view in Making a World After Empire, in which he argues that itwaspreciselyorganizationslikeAAPSO that broadened thereach of Bandung. 8 Sally Percival Wood has built on this by arguing that Bandung inspired a "conferencing phenomenon," based on the commonexperience of resistance to colonial oppression and a desire to reconnect cultural ties across the Afro-Asian region. 9 This article argues that a narrow view of the Bandung Moment obscures crucial Afro-Asian interaction in the early Cold War period, and that a hard separation between the state and non-state levels cannot be applied to the Afro-Asian regionalism of the early Cold War. A conference not officially sanctioned by one delegation's government could be an official conference in the eyes of another. The Delhi conference was not convened by the Indian Government, but convened many political actors, including from India itself. 10 Conversely, 6 Jamie Mackie, "The Bandung