In Our Best Interests:
Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities
during a Cold War

In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War expands the current discourses that shape the history and legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity by proposing Southeast Asia as a discursive and historical framework. Spread across two galleries, the exhibition presents contemporary artworks and archival materials that manifest shared imaginaries of global solidarities and regional affinities, and interrogates the historical contingencies that shaped these ideas and movements. In this conceptualisation, Southeast Asia becomes an exceptional coordinate that unravels claims to transregional solidarity within the expanded context of anti-colonial and anti-racist projects of world-making during the Cold War.

Two trajectories orient the course of the exhibition: the geopolitical and the geopoetic. On the one hand, the exhibition is attentive to how gestures of solidarity are situated within the material and cultural politics of the Cold War and its more insidious implications. Looking at lesser known aspects of Southeast Asian regional history, the exhibition problematises the pragmatic conditions of solidarity and regional history in this particular milieu. On the other, the exhibition allows for more fictive and poetic imaginations to flourish and makes space for agentive interventions to become legible. These trajectories interweave, mesh, and simultaneously disclose the limits of solidarity while refusing a total disavowal of the agency inherent in dreaming beyond and through geography and politics.

In the first gallery, works by Yee I-Lann, Fyerool Darma, Simon Soon and Munirah Mansoor, and Ming Wong are presented, deploying logics of solidarity to interrogate their own terms. In both the works of Fyerool Darma and Simon Soon in collaboration with Munirah Mansoor, an iconographic repertoire translates into shared grammars of imagination and speculation. The flags in Darma’s Flags for the Failed 1963 Maphilindo Confederation (2021) and the series of papan soerih in Soon’s Papan Soerih Perhimpoenan Orang Melayoe (2020) foreground the persistence of the faith in visual motifs to speak to, and to a greater extent constitute, a community based on the recognition of these languages.

Yee’s mat and map reclaim the capacities of world- and community-building. Whereas in Dusun Karaoke Mat: Ahaid zou noh doiti (2020), it is song, space, and the labours of the land’s people that engender affinities to place, in Borneo Heart (2021) it is place that animates affective structures of solidarity and community. By situating Borneo at the centre of the map and allowing the map to be bought and to circulate, the coordinates of belonging is also complicated and allowed to proliferate. The valences of iconography, place, and labour in crafting solidarities is also deployed in Wong’s video-poem titled Sunu Jappo / 手拉手 / Hand in Hand (2019). In Wong’s work however, these valences index disingenuous forms of influence made durable through Chinese aid. The difficult and uneasy aspects of ideas about solidarity that Wong addresses in this work is furthermore refracted by the works in the second gallery and its adjacent atrium.

The archival material and reproductions presented across the two galleries of the exhibition string the artworks and research projects into a loose historical constellation that covers the 1950s to 1990s and its contemporary resonances. Whereas the first gallery unpacks the affinities of Afro-Southeast Asia through Maphilindo (a proposed alliance comprising of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines from 1963), the second gallery focuses on broader historical trajectories of Afro-Southeast Asian affinities that stretch from the Cold War into the present. These affinities historically link Ariko S. Ikehara’s Sketches of Teryua Ar(t)chive (2021), an artwork and community archive that unpacks the evolution of a ‘black’ district in Okinawa that flourished in light of American Occupation; to bani haykal’s “We’re not satisfied with just making a noise.” (2020) that considers jazz as a medium of American cultural diplomacy associated with African American identity; to Vuth Lyno’s three-channel video 25 (2018) featuring interviews with the bi-racial children of African soldiers left behind by the United Nations Transitory Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC)’s peacekeeping project in 1992-1993; and to Eisa Jocson’s Passion of Darna (2019) which uses a Tagalog cover of African American R&B artist Karyn White’s song “Superwoman” to speaks to the struggles of the contemporary Filipino domestic worker.

The interdependence of the pragmatic gesture and the poetic imagination in ideations of Afro-Southeast Asian solidarity is nowhere more apparent in this exhibition than the recurrence of song or music across the galleries. Music emerges simultaneously as an ideological tool framed by state propaganda and cultural diplomacy as well as a weapon of resistance through the voice of the marginalised and the minority. In bani’s critique of jazz to Jocson’s redeployment of an R&B romantic ballad performed by an African American artist as anthem for the Filipino domestic worker, who becomes the face of the global subaltern; to Yee’s weaving of karaoke-resistance-folk songs onto a communal mat; and finally to the Chinese and African folk songs sung in Mandarin by Senegalese students as part of a Mandarin speaking competition that form the soundtrack of Wong’s video-poem, we see the refracted cultural resonances of postcolonial struggles carried in lyrics or music. They form an abstraction of a collective voice, a poetics of solidarity that continue to persist, offering hope despite a history of dreams that failed or were left unfulfilled.

Perspectives of
Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities

To explicate the geopolitical and geopoetic lines of inquiry pursued in the exhibition, this essay not only presents the artworks and a selection of the archival material presented in In Our Best Interests but also offers two interdependent threads based on the geopoetics of Maphilindo and the long geopolitical history of colour by which one can navigate the exhibition.

The Colours of World-Making:
Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities
during a Cold War

“In Our Best Interests,” the title of the exhibition, is a quote from an encounter that the African American journalist Carl T. Rowan had with the Philippine Senator Claro M. Recto in 1954. Reporting it in his book The Pitiful and the Proud (1956), Rowan writes:

[Senator Recto] argued for the Philippines’ participation in the Asian-African conference, because “it is in the best interest of the Philippines to identify with Asians.” He talk[ed] of the need for a “solidarity with Asians” and welcome Africans into that circle.¹

From 1954 to 1955, Rowan traveled through India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia as part of a cultural programme developed by the United States (US) State Department. He had lectured on journalism, spoken to presidents, cultural producers, and intellectuals, and attended the 1955 Bandung Conference.²

The Cold War, the post World War II (WWII) competition for hegemony of the world between the then two atomic superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, had brought Rowan to the Philippines.³As part of its cultural offensive, one of the key critiques that the Soviet Union levelled against the US was its policies of racial segregation. To counter this, the US State Department sent abroad African American cultural diplomats like Rowan, who was one of the most visible African American journalist in the US and known for his reportage of the Civil Rights movement, to evidence the achievements of African Americans and show that democracy enabled their work while building a cordial relation with new African and Asian nations.

Senator Recto on the other hand was the leader of the “Filipino-first” movement that was critical of US “neo-colonialism.” He advocated for neutrality in Philippine foreign relations and for economic independence from the US. In Southeast Asia, the Cold War was anything but cold as the region became a stage for a number of proxy conflicts informed by US aggressive foreign policy of ‘containing’ communism, resisting ‘left-nationalism’ and actively intervening into newly formed postcolonial states through aid or covert intervention, as we have come to learn in recent years about Indonesia’s communist purge in 1965.⁴ Domestic politics in the Philippines was dogged by its foreign policy and in particular, its relation to the US. He expressed to Rowan his worry that Filipinos were being called “American tools in the Asian countries.” Recto thought that Asian and racial pride were going to “become so strong no Asian will be able to stand the cries of ‘tool of the West’” or “traitor to your race.” For Recto, an affinity to Asia and by extension Africa, was in the best interest of the Philippines as it would propel it away from the neocolonial clutches of the US.

The exhibition’s title mobilises this anecdote to speak to the historical negotiation and specifically the best interests that informed the formation of solidarity in the anti-colonial projects of the early Cold War. Moreover, this story reminds us how unstable identities like being “Asian” were and how the historical milieu of the Bandung Conference was not a vocabulary of the imagined community of the nation-state but rather one of broader horizons, a vista of breaking with a colonial past and present that could be encapsulated by the person, community or by affinity rather than by citizenship.

While the Cold War has often been thought of as an international war, it is more productive to think of it as a background condition. Recent scholarship on the Cold War in Southeast Asia has emphasised regional and local forces drawing on outside actors such as the US for their own ideological and material purposes rather than superpowers manipulating allies and proxies.⁵

Given this, why was race or rather the rhetorics of it so prominent in the discussion between Recto and Rowan? Race figured prominently into the complex historical dynamics of solidarity against the backdrop of the Cold War in part because overcoming (neo-)colonialism was inherently a project of world-making. Adom Getachew’s book Worldmaking after Empire (2019), which in part inspired this exhibition, argues that decolonisation was a project of reordering the world with a more egalitarian world order and that anti-colonial nationalism, rather than being about nation-states was about world-making.⁶ Self-determinism was not achievable through the sovereignty of single states but through a re-ordering of the former ‘white’ imperial world because international relations before WWII was determined by “race subjection,” another term for imperialism.⁷ In effect, the world that was being unmade was a world under the hegemony of whiteness.

In 1900 at the meeting of the Pan-African Congress in London, W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American historian, diagnosed the problem of the 20th century as that of the “color line,” or what he defines as “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” By 1910, though, Du Bois noted that “the discovery of personal whiteness” was a subjective identification that crossed national borders and shaped global politics. Whiteness as much as it was a racial vocabulary was not wholly about ethnicity. Du Bois stated emphatically: “Whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen.”⁸

As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds note in Drawing the Global Colour Line (2008), whiteness was a defensive if not defiant position that responded to the “rising power of…the black and yellow races” that accompanied the mass immigration of empire.⁹ In rationalising the suppression of these races, ‘White countries’ prided themselves as having ‘ascendant democratic politics’ and a unique genius for self-government.

Whites ruled and the coloured races were ruled. It was this transnational whiteness of the 19th and 20th century that inspired international movements of resistance, such as pan-African and pan-Asian alliances that directly fed into the Bandung Conference in 1955 and which is a spectral concept (and not ethnicity) that haunts this exhibition and the contemporary art works that it presents. If whiteness was imperial power, how could colour be re-conceptualised as postcolonial power and thus bring about a more equal world?

For Getachew, the way postcolonial states believed they could do this was through regional federations and pan-African imaginations. The region was a necessary strategy of overcoming the postcolonial predicament of unequal power by creating larger, more diverse domestic markets, organising collective development plans and ensuring recognition of self-determination. Her observations, as the exhibition gestures at, might be productively applied to imaginations of Southeast Asia. The region, whether Africa or Southeast Asia, as a configuration of solidarity created new political and economic linkages between postcolonial states. These linkages would erode the influence of Cold War and imperial frameworks that subordinated postcolonial states on the international stage.

By the period of the 1950s and 1960s, which this exhibition partially focuses on, anti-racism was effectively also anti-colonialism and the postcolonial states that sort to re-make the world intentionally employed vocabularies of anti-racism to form more expansive solidarities that could connect Africa and Southeast Asia, as regions joined by the shared project of overcoming their histories and present realities of colonialism. As Rowan describes his initial reaction to Southeast Asia: “Southeast Asia is mankind aroused, trying to shake off the shackles of a long and unloved past.”¹⁰Rhetorics of colour and the pursuit of solidarity in Bandung or through Afro-Southeast Asian affinities becomes a cipher in the pursuit of the best interests of these new nations—a new international order.

From the anecdote it quotes to the archival material and artworks on display, In Our Best Interests in part focuses on the resonances of the Cultural Cold War, the “cultural diplomacy between the blocs, and within them, in areas outside what is ostensibly the direct state and governmental ambit, whether in the field of high culture (literature, the arts, music) or popular culture (television, pop and rock music, films).”¹¹Through this lens, the exhibition focuses on the creation of translocal communities and minorities that were the material byproducts of the aspirations of Afro-Asian and Afro-Southeast Asian solidarities and the endeavour during the Cold War to birth a fairer world of ‘colour.’

However, the artworks in this exhibition are not historical illustrations, rather they are interlocutors of this history, speaking to the contemporary resonances and personal impressions that these global dreams have made and complicating the different historical turns in which colour and identity have been employed to serve different interests.

While Ariko S. Ikehara’s Sketches of Teruya Ar(t)chive illustrates possibilities of an ideal post-racial communities that emerged in the shadow of American occupation built by individuals, Vuth Lyno’s 25 speaks to the personal price paid for the United Nations’s ‘progressive’ world-making.

Ming Wong’s ethnographic film Sunu Jappo /‬手拉手/ Hand in Hand unpacks the stakes of Senghor’s Museum of Black Civilisations finally being completed because of Chinese aid in 2018.

Eisa Jocson’s Passion of Darna, using a Tagalog cover of the 1980s ballad “Superwoman,” popularised by African American R&B artist Karyn White, to articulate the struggles of the contemporary Filipino domestic worker. Reading this work against other materials in the exhibition, one can glean a speculative link that binds the migrant worker to the historical and affective identities of colour and racial and gendered implications of transnational labour.

Through the presented artworks, the exhibition attends to the cultural consciousness that arose out of the interplay of the big histories of states and the small histories of an individual lives speaking to the ‘best interests’ that colour how we find, dream, and sing of solidarity today.

1 Carl Thomas Rowan, The Pitiful and the Proud (New York: Random House, 1956), 376.

2 The conference held in Indonesia from 18 to 24 April 1955 hosted 29 nations of Asia and Africa, and was described by Indonesian President Sukarno as “the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind.” The conference had sought to decrease polarisation between the two ideological poles of the Cold War.

3 Typically dated from 1945 to 1991, the Cold War was experienced differently through out the world. The Cold War in Southeast Asia is ear marked from 1948 to the late 1970s.

4 See Vincent Bevins, Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World (New York: Public Affairs, 2021).

5 Karl Hack and Geoff Wade, “The origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 443.

6 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

7 Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 1.

8 As quoted in Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1-2.

9 Ibid., 3.

10 Rowan, The Pitiful and the Proud, 279.

11 Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, “Culture,” in Palgrave Advances in Cold War History, ed. Saki R. Dockrill and Gearing Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmilian, 2006), 240-1.

Compelling Coordinates:
Maphilindo and Afro-Southeast
Asia Geopoetics

After a trip to the United States for the memorial of John F. Kennedy in December 1963, Philippine president Diosdado Macapagal visited Libya, Tanganyika (part of present-day Tanzania), Madagascar, and Kenya. It was a trip motivated by diplomacy and goodwill to the newly sovereign states, and a strategy to field for votes should the Philippine claim to Sabah prosper in the tribunal of the United Nations. Addressing the necessity of the trip, Macapagal remarks: “The African continent, like Asia itself, has long been a large fact in the geography of the World, but it is only in more recent times that the human implications of its geographic fact is beginning to be acknowledged as of political significance.”¹ Furthermore, he explains: “Yet between ours and the societies of the rest of Asia and of Africa are obvious common givens of historical circumstances. This, and the present situation of our political status is compelling enough, on our part, to make common cause and collaborate on general schemes with societies and peoples beyond the national geography.”²

Salient in Macapagal’s imagination is a geopoetic urgency that interrogates the factuality of both Africa and Asia—as coherently imagined geographies and fixed entities that share “common givens of historical circumstances.” In nominating this urgency as geopoetic, we take note of how it opens up the relationship between Africa and Asia to poetic interventions shaped by place and circumstance. In Macapagal’s explanation, geography is granted political significance as it is animated by “human implications” and a recognition that in the context of this moment during the Cold War, the present situation of Asia becomes “compelling enough…to make common cause and collaborate on general schemes” with people beyond the ambit of the nation.

This section starts by parsing this sentiment in order to elaborate an imaginative latitude for reconfiguring the current discourses that shape the history and legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity, formalised in the 1955 Bandung Conference, by way of Southeast Asia regionalism. Macapagal is a crucial figure in this narrative, a history that troubles the typical tenors that have shaped how we understand ideas of solidarity and sovereign self-determination. In this conceptualisation, Southeast Asia becomes an exceptional coordinate that unravels claims to transregional solidarity and speculates upon the possibilities of a post-imperial world order.

In prospecting a shift from Afro-Asia to Afro-Southeast Asia, the exhibition In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War constellates a different set of contexts that redefine how we have come to understand the terms of transregional solidarity. Considering the altered citations³of Southeast Asia regionalism, the exhibition posits Maphilindo (an amalgamation of then Malaya, Philippines, and Indonesia), an imagination of Southeast Asia regionalism based on a pan-Malayan ethnos, as a way to map out certain coordinates and trajectories that elaborate on the complex dynamics of solidarity in the context of Cold War politics. Maphilindo situates solidarity well within the multiple interfacings of neo-colonial entanglements of sovereignty and an imagination of a post-Cold War world order by way of the United Nations, both of which unfold here in the context of a compelling geopoetic imagination of pan-Malayan worldmaking.

The aspiration for solidarity is set against more pragmatic concerns of sovereign self-determination, diplomacy, enduring trappings of colonial and imperial relations, and even the traumatic experience of war. Surely, the milieu of the Cold War exposes the limits of the optimism that inheres in discourses of solidarity. However, there is also the same tendency to skim over the complexity of these contexts in favor of more pessimistic interpretations. The exhibition points us away from idealisations and simple dismissals of Afro-Asian solidarity and towards disperse alignments structured by anti-colonial and anti-racist interventions that elaborate a “common cause” between Africa and Southeast Asia. Writing about the specificities of the relationship of Africa and Southeast Asia in 1965, ten years after the Bandung Conference, for example, American social scientist Fred R. von der Mehden argues that “[a]side from Indonesia, relations between Africa and Southeast Asia remain sparse, sporadic and unspectacular.”⁴ He discovers that it was only within the United Nations that constant interaction between the two regions was most apparent. He explains that “[w]ithin the U.N. there has been a mutual interest expressed in the regional problems of the respective areas”:

African delegates spoke, but did not always vote unanimously, on Southeast Asian issues such as the West Irian and Malaysian issues. At the same time Southeast Asian states have spoken in support of the independence of the former French North African colonies and have entered the debate on the Congo. Southeast Asian governments have also sent troops to Africa on U.N. peace-keeping missions in the Congo and Gaza strip. However, no special relationship appears to have emerged between Southeast Asia and the new African states other than one based on the fact that they are all “underdeveloped states” with certain common problems.⁵

This account by von der Mehden is important in foregrounding the fraught nature of the affinities that the exhibition extrapolates upon. This is further fleshed out by an exchange between African American writer Richard Wright and local intellectuals in Indonesia during his visit for the Bandung Conference. While most accounts of the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung focus on the aspirational rhetorics of Third World international solidarity, Dutch Indonesian writer Beb Vuyk’s essay offers a more intimate narrative of Wright’s visit. Published in 1960, it is also one of the few accounts about Bandung that has been written by a woman. She narrates a series of exchanges between Indonesian intellectuals and Wright that evoke a sense of unease particularly about ideas of colour and colonialism. While Wright sees in the discourse of colour a surefooted source of solidarity, the group of Indonesian intellectuals identify “shared colonial past as a tie stronger than color.” An exchange between Indonesian novelist Mochtar Lubis and Wright proves cogent in this regard:

[Wright] went quiet for a moment, and then said, “What do you think is the most important fact of this century, from a historical point of view?”

“The liberation of the colonies,” answered Mochtar without hesitation.
…

“Mochtar, do you think the shared colonial past is a tie stronger than color?” I asked.

“Of course. The peoples of Asia and Africa have all been colonized in one way or another. They all gained their freedom in the same period, and they all have the same problems to solve.”⁶

What Vuyk’s essay captures is the complexity of the colonial experience outside what Wright would discern as the “color curtain,” or what Vuyk describes as the writer’s “black-and-white view of the world.”⁷The essay captures the limits of this racialism as rubric of solidarity, especially in the context of Southeast Asia, wherein what becomes the simplistic monochrome of Wright’s worldview is refracted by a history of colonialism that knows no sympathy to colour.

Indeed, the history and legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity would require sensitive and competent reframings as its coordinates are specified. The history of Maphilindo, for one, would be imagined differently from the perspective of the national history of the Philippines, will be different from how someone from Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, or Sabah would imagine it. This history will definitely be understood differently by someone from Congo or Uganda or Madagascar. For Macapagal, Maphilindo might be a productive way to consolidate regional influence, but for the people of Sabah it might be a history of armed border conflict or annexation. We yield from this approach a truly postcolonial history, wherein the colonial implications are not marvellously resolved but instead are continuously engaged with.

Established in July 1963, Maphilindo plays out the promise of regional solidarity imagined in Bandung. Filipino diplomat and Bandung delegate Carlos P. Romulo traces the continuity from Bandung to Maphilindo as one of the “effort of the emergent countries of Asia and Africa to come to a formulation of their common cause was eloquently expressed.”⁸ Within the framework of this exhibition, Afro-Asian connection finds a sharper articulation and assumes a more refractory capacity in Maphilindo. As Romulo argues: “The significance of Maphilindo is that it opens the actuality of closer relations between nations of Malayan origin. Through this process of greater interaction and political consultations (musjawarah) the device of colonial interests of fomenting discord is checked: the national awareness of each country actually will feed on the fact of mutual interest…”⁹ For him, the confederation articulates the “actuality of a united world” shaped by “a new intellectual relation” needed to reconfigure the “outmoded…observations of the past colonial strategies and motivations in the politics of Asia.”¹⁰

The early 1960s saw the consolidation of discourses on Malayan solidarity. Borneo assumes a crucial role in this milieu as it plays out the limits and excesses of this configuration in relation to how issues of regionality and region-formation are framed. Sabah, in particular, becomes a site of confrontation meshed in diplomatic relations and mired in armed antagonisms: in 1962, the Philippines staked its claims to the territory against British colonial power which led to a meeting between the two states in 1963 in London; in 1963, armed conflict sparked in Sabah led by “freedom fighters” encouraged by Indonesian state propaganda against the establishment of Malaysia, branding it as a British neo-colonial ploy and with Indonesia empowering their armed offensive via covert military aid.¹¹ This armed conflict and propaganda was enshrined in Indonesian President Sukarno’s policy of Konfrontasi, which aimed to forestall, if not prevent, the formation of Malaysia. In January to February 1964, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew traveled to 17 African states to explain the formation of Malaysia and its conflict with Indonesia. These itineraries point to how Africa becomes a crucial coordinate in the unravelling of the Cold War’s bipolar world order.

The aspirations of Maphilindo and its eventual collapse under the weight of Cold War politics elaborate on these complexities. While Maphilindo optimistically staked Malayan exceptionalism and a Third World politics that attempted to reconfigure Cold War world order, it was faced by diplomatic shortcomings, armed violence, and border conflicts, thus proving to be short-lived. While the confederation allowed for regional alignments and the compounding of regional political power, anxieties brought about by the threat of communism on one hand, and neo-colonial implications on the other rendered the organisation especially precarious.

The exhibition inaugurates this particular moment in Southeast Asia regionalism as a framework in mapping out the intricate entanglement of diplomacy, neo-colonialism, and sovereign self-determination to interrogate the legacies of the Afro-Asia movement and the discourses of inter- and transregional solidarity. In the theater of Cold War politics, how does one foreground the compelling imaginations of agency, affinity, solidarity, while simultaneously taking into account the insidious instrumentalisations of the imperial world order, which remained durable in this climate of self-determination and sovereign empowerment? How would reconsidering the coordinates of solidarity bring us to more vital trajectories of agency, shared grammars of self-determination, and more sympathetic urgencies with which to reconsider the history of solidarity, keen on refusing both the complete foreclosure of a local, geopoetic agency and intelligence, nor the total disavowal of neo-colonial entanglements and how they substantially altered the Southeast Asian lifeworld and the way it relates to other articulations of regionalisms?

By simultaneously problematising the limits of solidarity and accounting for the persistence of its aspirations, the exhibition highlights these imaginations’ fictive and contingent nature. In doing so, we foreground how agencies become geopoetic and how they elude becoming mere instrument or implication. From masonic rituals and iconographies that create communities, a map and a mat that reconfigure and reclaim how affinities are imagined, fabrications that imagine contemporary articulations of Maphilindo, to archival materials that speak to history and speculation, the works of the artists in this exhibition play out the complexity of ideas of solidarity in this exemplary milieu.

1 Diosdado Macapagal, “Report on United States and Africa Trip,” in Fullness of Freedom: Speeches and Statements of President Diosdado Macapagal, vol. IV (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1965), 162.

2 Ibid.

3 See Prasenjit Duara, Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013).

4 Fred R. von der Mehden, “Southeast Asian Relations with Africa,” Asian Survey 5, no. 7 (July 1965): 349.

5 Ibid., 343.

6 Beb Vuyk, “Weekend with Richard Wright,” trans. Keith Foulcher, PMLA 126, no. 3 (May 2011): 807.

7 Ibid., 808.

8 Carlos P. Romulo, “From Bandung to Maphilindo,” in Mission to Asia: The Dialogue Begins (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1964), 98.

9 Ibid., 100.

10 Ibid., 103.

11 See J. A. C. Mackie, Konfrontasi: The Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute, 1963-1966 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1974).