The Afro-Asian International: Black Left Feminists and China in the Bandung Era

The age of Bandung, named after the watershed conference held in the Indonesian city in April 1955, saw African and African diaspora activists, intellectuals, and politicians engaging intensively with the spirit of anticolonial and anti-imperialist solidarity in their efforts to imagine and create liberatory world orders. A range of such revolutionary alliances, both real and imagined, have been academically explored and/or publicly commemorated. But the crucial role of one coalitional relationship, that between Black leftist women activists and China, in shaping the practices and discourses of Bandung internationalism remains largely unstudied.

“The Other Afro-Asian International” traces the history of the interactions of a network of Black left feminists with Chinese political leaders and intellectuals during the first three decades of post-World War II decolonization. Examining the engagements of women activists based in the US, the UK, and East and West Africa—particularly Eslanda Robeson, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Claudia Jones, Mabel Williams, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Asha Babu, Vicki Garvin, Elaine Brown, and Olive Morris with China, this project seeks to advance third interrelated arguments that reveal African and African diasporic left feminists’ significant place in the history of Cold War Afro-Asian solidarity, thereby providing correctives to heteromasculinist narratives of midtwentieth-century radical internationalism. First, Black women activist-intellectuals and the party-state weaved anti-racial-capitalist struggles within the imperialist core, China’s construction of socialism, Asian and African decolonial movements into an alliance for the construction of a just world order with the aid of the era’s transportation and communication technologies. Second, such political and intellectual exchanges were
central to refining both Black left feminism’s and Chinese socialism’s conceptions of the enmeshment of racism, class exploitation, heteropatriarchal sexism, and imperialism, spawning Afro-Asian formations that challenged and at other times accommodated the racial, gender, sexual, and geopolitical status quo, both at the national and international level. Third, the geopolitics of the Cold War and of decolonization facilitated Black radical women’s feminist and internationalist worldmaking, but, at the same time, restricted the range of options available to them in pursuing revolutionary agendas. In exploring how they struggled to make their way through the uncertainties and complexities of the international politics of time, this project will show that Black left feminists sought to maintain independence in the envisioning and building of revolutionary alliances that would aid the emancipation of the global downtrodden.