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Afro-Southeast Asia Archive
(1947 - ) African American Writers in Southeast Asia Archive Excerpt from “A Weekend with Richard Wright Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) The Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC) (1966-1973) Contemporary Korean Art exhibition (1960-1961)
The Malaysia Mission vs. Maphilindo Diosdado Macapagal’s Foreign Diplomacy Robert Kennedy’s trip to the Far East (1964) Newsreels from Sabah
 


Afro-Southeast Asia Archive
(1947 - )

Prior to ASEAN (1967 - ) and its direct predecessor the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) (1961-1967), there were multiple attempts at regional formation and at developing shared political projects across the post-colonial world. These included military inflected alliances such as SEATO established in 1954, alliances built on decolonial goals such as the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 and racially imagined solidarities such as the pan-malayan Maphilindo.

The desire for regional solidarity as a shared political and cultural project has coloured many of these endeavors. The Asian Relations Conference of 1947, the predecessor of the Bandung Conference, which was originally identified with Southeast Asia, took place in New Delhi and was organized by the Indian Council of World Affairs. Meant to be non-political, the conference encouraged cultural and educational exchange between Asian countries and did not include military support. The second conference which was meant to be held in China in 1949 was moved to Baguio in the Philippines in 1950 in light of the Chinese Civil War. In both iterations of the conference, cultural exchange and exhibitionary projects were highlighted as desired outcomes.

The Bandung Conference of 1955 hosted by President Soekarno of Indonesia was deemed the first gathering of coloured nations. It was an alliance unified in its project of decolonialization and making what Adom Getachew has termed a post-imperial world order.  These nations looked to lobby for decolonization in countries especially in Africa that had yet to establish independent governments. The Bandung Conference and its final resolution laid the foundation for the nonaligned movement during the Cold War, which was seen as a policy of neutrality in the face of bi-polar international system defined by Sino-Soviet Communism and US liberal democracy.


Non-political and non-aligned affinities were an important facet of regionalism and alliance-building during the Cold War. From Southeast Asian nations seeking political affirmation from their African counterparts to Southeast Asian nations reviewing regional partnerships in relation to the wider Cold War competition, regional partnerships and the cultural production they enabled through exhibitions and artistic exchanges were often defined by their political postures they took. ASPAC for example was deemed too similar an anti-communist body to SEATO that Minister Adam Malik of Indonesia deemed it difficult for ASEAN in 1972 to co-operate with.

This exhibition, like its predecessors in Manila and Singapore, brings together historical material that illustrate the cultural exchanges and moments of imagined transnational cooperation as well as pan-African independence or liberation projects from the region and the Republic of  Korea. From a poster of Huey Newton upon a Manila chair to regional protests related to the assasination of the Congo’s first prime minister Patrice Lumumba in 1970 to exhibitions carried out under the auspices of  regional associations, these objects of mutual cultural exchange registered the evolving cultural language and the shifting political aspirations of the Cold War milieu. They are foils that provide a context to flesh out the artistic research manifested by the contemporary artworks that reflect upon the enduring legacies of this period.
Portrait of Huey Newton, Black Panther Party's founder and Minister of Defense, seated on a peacock chair
1967
Reproduction
45.7 cm x 30.5 cm

The Peacock chair, also known as the Manila chair, is a single-seat chair with an oversized backrest that resembles a fully fanned peacock’s tail. It is made of rattan, a pliable reed harvested from a palm indigenous to the Malay world. It is woven into baskets and chairs, mostly as furniture for export. At some point it was known as “manila,” after the Philippine capital where perhaps most of rattan furniture comes from. One account historicizes the production of the chair within the penitentiary system of the Philippines with jailed criminals being tasked to weave home furnishings. In this iconic portrait taken in 1967, Black Panther Party founder and Minister of Defense Huey Newton is seen seated on a Peacock chair. The Black Panther Party is an anti-police brutality political organization led by African American students and founded in 1966 in Oakland. He is framed on either side by what annotators have identified as “traditional African shields.” There is a zebra carpet on the floor. In his right hand he holds a rifle, on his left is a spear. The chair resembles a throne, his gait regal, the objects surrounding him evoking power and violence. The Peacock chair participates in this iconography that recalls conventional representations of African culture—at once regal and unfamiliar, exotic.
The Cape Malays: History, Religion, Traditions, Folk Tales
 I. D. du Plessis
1944
Maskew Miller Limited
Cape Town

Written by Izak David du Plessis, an Northern Afrikaans poet and at some point Secretary of Colored Affairs in South Africa, The Cape Malays is an ethnographic account of the life and culture of the eponymous Cape Malays, a Muslim population in South Africa who descended from the Orang Cayen, Indonesian Muslim men of wealth and influence who were sent away because they became a danger to the administration of the Dutch East India Company. While the book has been critiqued as rehearsing an essentialist and idealist mythology of the Cape Malays that skirts around issues of White supremacy in South Africa, the book is an important document imagining this history and culture. The Cape Malay population is an important historical legacy of the role of the Muslim intellectuals in anti-imperial worldmaking. Its transplantation into the context of South Africa opens up to more complicated issues of ethno-racial politics. Presented alongside All the Lands within the Sea, Cape Malays points to how the historical connections between Southeast Asia, Asia and Africa span long before the Cold War.

Excerpt from “From Bandung to Maphilindo”
Mission to Asia: The Dialogue Begins
1964
Carlos P. Romulo
University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City

Book Jacket, The Meaning of Bandung
Carlos P. Romulo
1956
University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

Excerpt from “Southeast Asian Relations with Africa”
Asian Survey 5, no.7
Fred R. Von der Mehden
July 1965

Asia and Africa: A New Era
G. Mirsky and L. Stepanov
Translated by G. P. Ivanov-Mumjiev
1961
Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow

Faceting Afro-Southeast Asia affinities, this selection of material accounts for different vantage points from which Africa and Southeast Asia relations might be looked at. The figure of diplomat, former president of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, and Filipino Bandung delegate Carlos P. Romulo (1898-1985) is central in this relay of relations. In a speech before the University of Padjadjaram in Bandung in 1964, Romulo traces the historical continuity between the Bandung Conference of 1955 to MAPHILINDO, a confederation of the Malay states of Southeast Asia formed in 1963,  as part of “the effort of the emergent countries of Asia and Africa to come to a formulation of their common cause.” This optimism towards the accomplishments of Afro-Asian solidarity is shared by Soviet writers G. Mirsky and L. Stepanov whose account in the book Asia and Africa: A New Era imagines this along sharper ideological lines wherein Russia’s October Revolution is responsible of “the breach in the united front of imperialism” that unraveled the hierarchies of the “White West and Coloured East.” The idealism that these two accounts prospect is tempered by the sober assessment of American political scientist Fred R. Von der Mehden who, in looking at regular diplomatic exchanges, relations in trade, formal international organizations, and Afro-Asian conferences, determine that exchanges between Africa and Southeast Asia have been “sporadic and meager.” In his account of Afro-Southeast Asian relations in the context of the U.N. excerpted here,  he says that although mutual interest are expressed in regional problems of both territories, “no special relationship appears to have emerged between Southeast Asia and the new African states other the than the one based on the fact that they are all ‘underdeveloped states’ with certain common problems.”