Afterword: the Zigzag of the Global in the Histories of the League Against Imperialism

Summary

Bandung exercises a powerful gravitational pull on histories of the League Against Imperialism. Speakers at the 1955 conference hailed the LAI as an avatar and actively recruited it as a legitimating ground upon which to launch a post-colonial new world order. The citationary apparatus built upon the League, and upon the 1927 Brussels conference which propelled it, has allowed the LAI to remain suspended in a kind of radical temporality. Bandung punctuates the global anti-imperial timeline: it is the becoming of a Third Worldism begun in Brussels and made manifest, if imperfectly, by anticolonial leaders-turned-statesmen like Nehru and Sukarno. Historically, the League and Brussels with it are icons of a much-anticipated globalism whose interwar origins were a powerful lieux de memoire. And to the extent that the League has been treated historiographically, it has depended for its iconic sheen on its genealogical relationship to Bandung in scholarly accounts as well. What Vijay Prasad has said recently of Bandung has proven uncannily true of Brussels: it was a site of dreams, glimpsed nostalgically perhaps, but less for what it was than what it could have been—and for what it continued to suggest into mid-century and beyond.

To some degree this politics of citation is historically and affectively intelligible. There was enough continuity in participation between the two conferences to make it a touchstone. And while few historians have focused on the cultural experiences of the events themselves, it is clear how and why the atmosphere of anti-imperial solidarity among a generation of men in the early stages of their political lives should give rise to a sense of collective purpose in reality and in memory. And yet, as the essays collected here suggest, it is past time to untangle the League from both the Brussels Congress and Bandung per se. In the first instance, the launch of the LAI is not as significant as its ten-year life as a motor of transcontinental anticolonial activity and propaganda—from Argentina to China, Palestine to Ireland to South Africa to Japan, to name just a few of the sites where the League had contacts, if not fully operating branches. This affiliation of proto-national movements was, to be sure, loose and even precarious, but it signals the ambition and the international reach of LAI ideas and connections.