Su Lin Lewis

12 June 2021
5pm—6.30pm (SGT)

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aki@greyprojects.org

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In the wake of Asian decolonisation, socialist intellectuals across Asia collectively promoted a new vision of Third World socialism and anti-colonial solidarity in the early years of the Cold War. Through the 1950s, leading members of socialist parties from Ghana to Japan convened at Asian Socialist Conferences in both Rangoon and Bombay. The conferences promoted democratic socialism as a ‘Third Way’ out of the escalating ideological war between capitalism and communism, and a political model that valued individual freedoms, social security, and equal rights for men and women. The ‘Asian Socialist Conference’ also became a permanent secretariat based in Rangoon, which published important publications to reach Asian as well as African audiences that promoted anti-colonial solidarity and hope for a non-aligned future. This talk will discuss the Asian Socialist Conference, and its legacies, within the context of the broader Afro-Asian networks during the Cold War era.

Dr Su Lin Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Modern Global History at the University of Bristol. She specialises in the social history of cities and civil society in Southeast Asia. Her monograph, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 and won the Urban History Association’s Prize for Best Book (2015-16). She was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC Research Network on “Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War” (2015-2018) which explores transnational movements of activists, literati, and artists across Asia and Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. The network has a website and a vibrant blog.