"To Carry Water on Both Shoulders": Carlos P. Romulo, American Empire, and the Meanings of Bandung

Radical History Review

Volumn 95, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 173-190

  Espiritu, Augusto ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 42449092022     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2006-95-173     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956), 1.
2. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 168. It should be noted that various participants in the conference already belonged to Cold War security pacts such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Turkey), the Central Treaty Organization (Iran, Iraq, and Turkey), and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines) in response to various perceived threats of communist expansionism prior to the Bandung. See John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 152, 153.
3. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 169.
4. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (New York: Third World, 1956), 14.
5. Malcolm X, "Message to the Grass Roots," in Malcolm X Speaks, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1965), 5-6.
6. Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 14.
7. Cary Fraser, "An American Dilemma: Race and Realpolitik in the American Response to the Bandung Conference," in Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 133-37.
8. Ibid., 136.
9. Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 73-99.
10. Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 364-65.
11. A. E. Afigbo et al., eds., The Making of Modern Africa (New York: Longman, 1986), 2:352-54;
12. x Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (London: Verso, 2002), 207-8, 217-19;
13. rlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1988), 333, 347. The story of the decline in prestige among nonaligned nations that accompanied Castro's refusal to condemn the Soviet Union, Cuba's principal financial and military ally, after the invasion of Afghanistan is told in the PBS film The American Experience: Fidel Castro (dir. Maria Daniels, 2004).
14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 1-2.
15. Carlos P. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 3-4. Romulo's breakdown of the ideological leanings of those represented in Bandung is more astute than the simple pro-communist versus anticommunist dichotomies upheld by most accounts.
16. For an account of Romulo's intellectual history, from his earliest days as a journalist in the American empire period (1899-1946) to his later years of service to Marcos, see my Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 9-45.
17. My interpretation of Gramsci here is based on readings proposed by Anne Showstack Sassoon that highlight hegemony and counterhegemony as historically situated tendencies, rather than as discrete essences based on unchanging political divisions. Hence, Sassoon prefers the usage of hegemonic and counterhegemonic in Gramsci to highlight a changing dynamic and the varying social alignments that construct both. See Anne Showstack Sassoon, "Hegemony," in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 202.
18. See Said's readings of Conrad in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), e.g., xviii.
19. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 131-32.
20. Romulo's anticommunist novel The United (New York: Crown, 1951), for instance, takes the Korean War as its backdrop.
21. See below for my discussion of Romulo's private letter to the secretary of state Dean Acheson; see also Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile, 23.
22. Homer A. Jack, Bandung: An On-the-Spot Description of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Chicago: Toward Freedom Pamphlet, n.d.);
23. hin, The Asian-African Conference; Lewis W. Gleeck, The Third Philippine Republic (Quezon City: New Day, 1993), 172-74;
24. n Eschen, Race against Empire, 169; and Fraser, "An American Dilemma," 116, 119, 129, 131.
25. Jawaharlal Nehru, "War, Peace, and Co-operation," in Asian-African Conference, Bandung, April 1955: Speeches of the Prime Minister of India in the Closed Sessions (Republic of India, Ministry of External Affairs, Miscellaneous Publications, n.d.), 26, 28, 39, 40. Nehru's speech in the closed session on April 23, 1955, and his second speech titled "Promotion of World Peace and Co-operation," were direct, if somewhat defensive, responses to Romulo and the pro-Western delegates. For instance, he responded to Romulo's assertion of the threat to small nations posed by large nations like China and India by stating, "All the bigness of India did not prevent India from becoming a subject nation." Moreover, he assured Bandung delegates that "India will not do this or do that thing because of the quality of the Indian people, not because of their numbers" (28). Nehru responded as well in an impassioned manner against regional security pacts, which seemed to heighten tensions in Southeast Asia in the wake of the Geneva Conference of 1954, which ended French occupation and created a settlement of the Vietnam question. Questioning the foundation of the Manila Agreement, Nehru asks, "What was the threat in South East Asia then and where did it come from? There was not the slightest fear of aggression to any of the countries of South East Asia. ⋯ It seemed to be an angry reaction [by the anti-Communist nations] to what had happened in Geneva. ⋯ It added rather to the insecurity of the region because it has put others on guard that here is an organisation which is a military pact" (39-40).
26. Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 267-69. Of course, the view from among the Central Luzon peasants differed from the official nationalist perspective. Their efforts at creating more humane landlord-tenant relations were crushed by state and civilian terrorism, absentee landlords, and the increasing mechanization of agriculture.
27. Fraser, "An American Dilemma," 128, 129, 131.
28. U.S. Department of State, Secretary John Foster Dulles, "Memorandum of Conversation with the President [Dwight D. Eisenhower]," April 11, 1955, Document 3217, in Declassified Documents Reference System, U.S. (Woodbridge, CT: Primary Source Media, n.d.), 1, infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/ deka36484?db=DDRS;
29. erations Coordinating Board, "Memorandum of Meeting, Jan. 20, 1955, Working Group on Nuclear Energy Projects and Related Information Programs (Including NSC 5431/1)," Document 3515, in Declassified Documents, 6.
30. Fraser, "An American Dilemma," 131; see also 128-29; U.S. Department of State, Operations Coordinating Board, "Progress Report on 'U.S. Objectives and Courses of Action with Respect to Southeast Asia' (NSC 5405) and Portions of NSC 5429/5," December 9, 1955, Document 1068, in Declassified Documents, 1.
31. "OIR No. 6903, April 27, 1955 - Results of the Bandung Conference: A Preliminary Analysis," Document 1278, in Declassified Documents, 1.
32. Jack, Bandung, 13.
33. "OIR No. 6903," 6-7.
34. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 284.
35. A. V. H. Hartendorp, "The Asian-African Conference in Bandung," Fookien Times Yearbook 1955 (Manila: Fookien Times, 1955), 178.
36. Mohamed Abdel Khalek Hassouna, The First Asian-African Conference Held at Bandung, Indonesia (April 18-24, 1955), League of Arab States (n.p.: n.p., 1955).
37. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, 17.
38. Wright, The Color Curtain, 128
39. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung.
40. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, 23, 24.
41. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 22.
42. The following passage on Gandhi from Romulo's posthumous tribute to Nehru might be indicative of Romulo's view of India's contribution to nationalism in the postwar period, and most likely at the time of Bandung as well: "Gandhi sought to revive the national spirit of India and made it a great moral force against a modern phenomenon of politics: colonialism. Against the militarism of the West represented by British rule in India, Gandhi endeavoured to muster the spiritual force of the Indian identity and to imbue the Indian people with the consciousness of unity; in the end, the spirit of Gandhi and the Indian nation prevailed in the midst of the colonial policy of divide et impera." See Carlos P. Romulo, "Asia, Africa, and the World," in The Emerging World: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Volume (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1964), 191.
43. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 22.
44. See Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: Norton, 1994), 549, 564. American destabilization efforts continued in the 1950s and 1960s in opposition to the nationalist and socialist leaning governments of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo and Sukarno in Indonesia.
45. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 47.
46. Carlos P. Romulo, I Walked With Heroes (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961).
47. "Carols P. Romulo to Secretary Acheson, March 1950," reprinted in America in Vietnam: A Documentary History, ed. William Appleman Williams, Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, and Walter LaFerber (New York: Anchor Press, 1985), 103.
48. Ibid..
49. See the introduction to Carlos P. Romulo, Mother America: A Living Story of Democracy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1943).
50. Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung, 58.
51. Romulo, I Walked With Heroes, 282.
52. Ibid., 317.
53. See especially the segment titled "Resistance" in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitudes: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).