Resisting Empire, Reconfiguring the Cold War

This paper looks at three milestone events of the Cold War – the Asian-African Conference that met in Bandung in 1955, the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris during 1956, and Ghana’s 1957 independence – in order to make three principal arguments. First, despite Cold War pressures, transnational movements against imperialism remained definitive elements of the global politics of the 1950s. Secondly, these movements ensured that the Cold War would be about the struggle between the forces of empire and those of decolonization as much as it was about the confrontation between the superpowers. Third, in challenging imperialism, these movements rearranged the world map by unsettling the relationship between center and periphery that had been foundational to Western dominance. The delegates and celebrants who gathered at these three events, novelists like Richard Wright, theorists like Frantz Fanon, and politicians like Kwame Nkrumah, reconfigured global relations of power at they challenged longstanding structures of dominance. This paper will call attention to these dynamics, and thus clarify the ways in which the Cold War was a form of geopolitical organization as well as an epistemological construct that obscured the imbrications between antidemocratic Communism, racial imperialism, and capitalist dispossession. In revisiting these events now over a half-century in the past, I hope to prompt a collective discussion about cultural work and geopolitics by adding to our sense that the Cold War was a struggle between Three, not Two, Worlds, and I hope to further establish the fundamental role of imperialism in the racial present.