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Ghosts of Bandung makes the major new argument that the fates of the Black and Palestinian revolutions were bound together through the rise and fall of a larger Third World political project. Drawing on English and Arabic archives, Derek A. Ide shows how Afro-Arab solidarities shaped and were shaped by geopolitics and grand strategy. Through biographical vignettes of forgotten figures and underexplored groups, Ghosts of Bandung interweaves the histories of movement dynamics and those of contending states in the global Cold War. This story binds the United States and the Middle East—Detroit and Damascus, Oakland and Algiers—while spanning the globe. From the Sino-Soviet split to the Beijing-Jakarta Axis, this global retelling of Black Power and the Palestinian Revolution engages China, Cuba, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, and others. At the heart of this broader project is the hitherto untold story of CONEFO, Indonesian President Sukarno’s attempt to construct an alternative United Nations–like organization in Jakarta. Centering on 1965 and the collapse of CONEFO, Ide links the fates of Black Power and the Palestinian Revolution to the fall of Third Worldism and the “Bandung Spirit.”
“Ghosts of Bandung is a powerful excavation of a forgotten Third World internationalism. Derek Ide traces the political and intellectual ties linking Black Power activists and Palestinian revolutionaries, revealing how both emerged from the promise of the Bandung era. This book recovers a world of anticolonial possibility while illuminating the forces that sought to extinguish it.”—Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
“A revelatory work of Global South history that illustrates the contours of an emergent Third World in the shadow of the Cold War. Working with Arabic and anglophone sources, Ghosts of Bandung offers an illuminating account of Black internationalism and the circulation of ideas and people across the Global South in the Third World era.”—Alex Lubin, author of Never-Ending War on Terror
“A major accomplishment. Works like this are going to represent the next generation of research on the transnational movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Ghosts of Bandung will serve as the basis of a new school of scholarship.”—Sean Malloy, author of Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War