Making a World After Empire

Christopher J. Lee is the author of Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism, and Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa and the editor of Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. He is an associate professor of history at Lafayette College.

"Bandung names not only the 1955 summit, but the political imagination of unfinished Afro-Asian decolonization and internationalism with whose significance we continue to reckon. The essays in this collection consider the possibilities and impossibilities of Bandung, from the uses of the nation-state, regionalisms "from below," and the Third World project, to the endurance of other world-making projects uncontained by the Cold War and the ascendance of the U.S.-led global order." "Renewed interest in the 'Bandung Spirit' and its afterlives, prompted in part by this excellent volume, attests to the perpetual desire, even ethical imperative, to recover historical visions of better humanistic political futures. In the spirit of Bandung itself, Christopher Lee has brought together a collection of essays that explore not only the radical historical importance and profound challenges of the original conference in Bandung; they also speak poignantly to the critical problems and imaginative possibilities of our own time. Indeed, this re-edition of Making a World after Empire comes at a time when the liberal international order, demanded and affirmed by the Third World at Bandung, is under severe threat, when the stakes of our political imaginations of community have never been higher, and when the need for vital alternatives to secure a humane future have never been more urgent." "This important collection of essays points to a phenomenon that has been lost in the common assumption of a worldwide movement from colonial empires to nation-states: the richer imagination of people in those empires and their quest for alternative modes of political connection." "Readers interested in Bandung can do no better than consult Making a World After Empire."