Strategies of Belonging in the Bandung Era: Diasporas and Cold War Asia

Abstract: This article illustrates how the so-called Bandung Moment in the mid-1950s created a dynamic that forced emigrant communities in Asia to adopt new strategies of belonging. It compares the circumstances of three major diasporic communities—the Indonesian Chinese, the Philippine Chinese, and Koreans in Japan. Although the “Bandung era” usually has an undertone of celebrating Third World internationalism, its embrace of such nation-to-nation internationalism came at the expense of these diasporic groups’ previously fluid and ambiguous identities. Many people in these groups decided to commit themselves to the nationalizing projects of their external “homelands,” which also meant siding with one Cold War camp or the other. Our comparison shows that this dynamic was not coincidental but rather intrinsic to Bandung internationalism. It ironically undermined the espoused solidarity against Cold War divisions and instead contributed to deepening these divisions.