Introduction: Culture as a Front in the Global Struggle

When the leaders of 29 Asian and African nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, their discussions were not limited to diplomacy, trade, or military alliances.  Beneath the political agenda lay another, quieter revolution — a cultural one.  The Bandung Conference signalled the arrival of the Global SouthGlobal South Full Description:The Global South is a term that has largely replaced “Third World” to describe the nations of Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. It is less a geographical designator (as it includes countries in the northern hemisphere) and more a political grouping of nations that share a history of colonialism, economic marginalization, and a peripheral position in the world financial system. Bandung is often cited as the birth of the Global South as a self-aware political consciousness. Critical Perspective:While the term implies solidarity, critics argue it acts as a “flattening” concept. It lumps together economic superpowers like China and India with some of the world’s poorest nations, obscuring the vast power imbalances and divergent interests within this bloc. It risks creating a binary worldview that ignores the internal class exploitations within developing nations by focusing solely on their external exploitation by the North.
Read more not only as a political bloc, but as a creative and moral force.

In the decade that followed, the “Bandung Spirit” spread far beyond conference halls.  It inspired artists, filmmakers, writers, and intellectuals to imagine a shared cultural identity that transcended colonial borders.  Across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, creative communities began to articulate a third way of seeing the world — neither Western capitalist nor Soviet socialist, but grounded in anti-imperialism, solidarity, and cultural pride.

This cultural dimension of Bandung unfolded during what historians call the Cultural Cold WarCultural Cold War Full Description:The Cultural Cold War refers to the struggle for “hearts and minds” waged through literature, art, cinema, and music. In the wake of Bandung, both the US (via the CIA) and the USSR (via state cultural organs) poured money into the Global South to sponsor writers, filmmakers, and artists, hoping to steer the post-colonial cultural identity toward either capitalism or communism. Critical Perspective:This phenomenon highlights that culture in the 20th century was never neutral; it was a battlefield. It compromised the autonomy of post-colonial intellectuals, many of whom were unknowingly funded by foreign intelligence agencies. It suggests that the “freedom of expression” championed during this era was often curated and manipulated by superpowers to serve geopolitical ends.
Read more, a worldwide battle for hearts and minds in which art, film, and literature were used as instruments of ideology.  The superpowers sought to project their visions of freedom and modernity through cultural diplomacy.  But the Bandung nations, too, recognised that art could be political.  They used culture as a form of resistance and as a way to express the dignity of the newly decolonised world.

This article explores that story — how Bandung shaped global culture, and how artists from Cairo to Calcutta, from Lagos to Jakarta, forged creative solidarities that challenged Western dominance and redefined the meanings of freedom and identity in the twentieth century.

The Cultural Cold War and the Battle for Meaning

In the 1950s and 1960s, culture became one of the most important arenas of the Cold War.  The United States and the Soviet Union both understood that ideology could be conveyed as effectively through film, art, and music as through diplomacy or propaganda.

Washington funded cultural initiatives through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), sponsoring art exhibitions, literary journals, and jazz tours to present the U.S. as the defender of liberty and creativity.  The CIA quietly supported writers such as Arthur Koestler and publications like Encounter and Transition, designed to win over intellectuals in the decolonising world.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union countered with its own cultural outreach — film festivals, ballet tours, friendship societies, and technical education programs.  Moscow hosted “peace conferences” for writers and artists and supported Third WorldThird World Full Description: Originally a political term—not a measure of poverty—used to describe the nations unaligned with the capitalist “First World” or the communist “Second World.” It drew a parallel to the “Third Estate” of the French Revolution: the disregarded majority that sought to become something. The concept of the Third World was initially a project of hope and solidarity. It defined a bloc of nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that shared a common history of colonialism and a common goal of development. It was a rallying cry for the global majority to unite against imperialism and racial hierarchy. Critical Perspective:Over time, the term was stripped of its radical political meaning and reduced to a synonym for underdevelopment and destitution. This linguistic shift reflects a victory for Western narratives: instead of a rising political force challenging the global order, the “Third World” became framed as a helpless region requiring Western charity and intervention. filmmakers sympathetic to socialism.

Between these two cultural empires stood the emerging Bandung world — nations newly freed from colonial rule but wary of replacing one ideological dependency with another.  For them, the task was not simply to choose sides, but to create a new cultural language of independence.

Bandung and the Idea of Cultural Sovereignty

At the Bandung Conference itself, cultural issues were not formally on the agenda, yet they infused the entire atmosphere.  Sukarno, Indonesia’s charismatic host, framed the event in civilisational terms.  In his opening speech, he declared:

“We are united by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. We are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world.”

He described Asia and Africa as the cradles of the world’s great civilisations — Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism — and suggested that the revival of their cultural dignity was as essential as political freedom.

This notion of cultural sovereignty became one of Bandung’s most enduring legacies.  For centuries, colonial powers had represented the non-Western world as passive, backward, or derivative.  Bandung inverted that hierarchy.  It invited Asian and African artists to see themselves as heirs of rich civilisational traditions and as architects of a new, shared modernity.

Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, a lifelong patron of the arts, believed that decolonisation required reclaiming the imagination.  Egyptian delegates echoed this idea, arguing that political independence without cultural self-expression would remain hollow.  The conference thus seeded a network of artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals who would, over the next two decades, forge what Vijay Prashad calls the “Bandung aesthetic” — a mode of art rooted in liberation and human solidarity.

Cinema and the Bandung Imagination

No art form captured the Bandung spiritThe Bandung Spirit Full Description:The Bandung Spirit refers to the intangible atmosphere of optimism, solidarity, and peaceful coexistence that characterized the 1955 conference. It denotes a specific diplomatic approach based on consensus-building, non-interference, and the prioritizing of shared post-colonial struggles over ideological differences. Critical Perspective:Historians often view the “Spirit” as a romanticized myth that papers over the deep cracks present at the conference. In reality, the conference was rife with tension between pro-Western nations (like Pakistan and the Philippines), communist nations (China), and neutralists (India). The “Spirit” was often a diplomatic fiction maintained to present a united front to the West, masking the fact that many attendees were actively suspicious of one another’s territorial ambitions.
Read more more powerfully than cinema.  Film was the ideal medium for the new nations: visual, populist, and capable of crossing linguistic boundaries.

India and Egypt: The Twin Engines

Two cinematic powerhouses emerged at the forefront of post-Bandung cultural diplomacy — India and Egypt.  Both countries had large film industries before independence, but in the 1950s they began to redefine cinema as a tool of national identity and international solidarity.

In India, directors like Satyajit Ray, Mehboob Khan, and Bimal Roy portrayed poverty, injustice, and human resilience with a new moral seriousness.  Films like Mother India (1957) and Pather Panchali (1955) won global acclaim while embodying the ethos of postcolonial dignity.  India’s Nehruvian government supported these productions as part of its soft-power outreach to Asia and Africa.

Egypt’s Studio Misr and state-run film institutions under Gamal Abdel Nasser took a similar path.  Directors such as Youssef Chahine depicted the struggles of ordinary Egyptians against imperialism and feudalism.  Cairo Station (1958) and The Land (1969) explored social injustice while celebrating Egyptian identity.  These films travelled widely through Africa and the Arab world, forging emotional connections between distant audiences.

By the late 1950s, Indian and Egyptian films were circulating across the Global South — dubbed into Arabic, Swahili, and Bahasa Indonesia.  Nasser and Nehru even discussed the creation of a joint Afro-Asian Film Festival, which eventually materialised in 1958 in Cairo and later in Jakarta and New Delhi.  These festivals became forums for filmmakers from Senegal, Burma, and China to share techniques and stories.  Cinema became, in effect, a Bandung commons — a space where the newly independent could tell their own stories to each other.

Literature and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement

If cinema was the most visible expression of the Bandung spirit, literature was its intellectual foundation.  The years after 1955 saw a flowering of Afro-Asian literary collaborationCollaboration Full Description:The cooperation of local governments, police forces, and citizens in German-occupied countries with the Nazi regime. The Holocaust was a continental crime, reliant on French police, Dutch civil servants, and Ukrainian militias to identify and deport victims. Collaboration challenges the narrative that the Holocaust was solely a German crime. across Europe, local administrations assisted the Nazis for various reasons: ideological agreement (antisemitism), political opportunism, or bureaucratic obedience. In many cases, local police rounded up Jews before German forces even arrived. Critical Perspective:This term reveals the fragility of social solidarity. When their Jewish neighbors were targeted, many European societies chose to protect their own national sovereignty or administrative autonomy by sacrificing the minority. It complicates the post-war myths of “national resistance” that many European countries adopted to hide their complicity.
Read more.

In 1958, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau was established in Tashkent (then part of the USSR) and later moved to Cairo and Accra.  The bureau published the journal Lotus, which became a flagship of Third World literary thought.  Lotus featured poetry, fiction, and essays from writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Chinua Achebe — figures who linked art with political liberation.

The Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences, held in Cairo (1962), Beirut (1967), and Delhi (1970), explicitly invoked Bandung’s heritage.  Their manifestos declared literature a weapon against “imperialism, racism, and exploitation.”  As Ngũgĩ later recalled, “Bandung taught us that imagination was also part of the struggle.”

At the same time, the West watched nervously.  The CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom tried to lure prominent Third World writers into its orbit, sponsoring alternative magazines and international prizes.  Yet many refused.  The writers of the Bandung world were determined to retain their independence.

Art, Music, and the Aesthetic of Solidarity

Visual art also reflected Bandung’s ideals.  In Africa, artists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi (Sudan), Skunder Boghossian (Ethiopia), and Uche Okeke (Nigeria) blended modernist styles with indigenous motifs, rejecting both Western academicism and Soviet realism.  Their work embodied what El-Salahi called a “third line” — a synthesis between tradition and modernity.

In Asia, painters like Affandi (Indonesia) and Cheong Soo Pieng (Singapore) pioneered abstract forms inspired by local landscapes and myths.  Across the Arab world, artists used calligraphy, folk imagery, and revolutionary symbols to assert cultural independence.

Music, too, became a form of diplomacy.  Indonesian gamelan orchestras toured Africa; Egyptian composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab collaborated with Indian musicians; and Afro-Cuban rhythms entered the soundtracks of Indian films.  Jazz — both American and African — played a complex role.  While the U.S. government used jazz tours to project freedom, African and Asian musicians reinterpreted the genre as a symbol of black and global liberation.  Figures like Abdullah Ibrahim (South Africa) and Fela Kuti (Nigeria) infused jazz with political consciousness drawn from Bandung’s example.

The Role of Festivals and Cultural Diplomacy

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed an explosion of cultural festivals that carried Bandung’s spirit into the public sphere.

The Cairo Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference (1957) featured art exhibitions and concerts alongside political meetings. The World Festival of Youth and Students, often hosted in socialist capitals, became a venue where Bandung-aligned artists met their Eastern Bloc counterparts on relatively equal terms. The 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, organised under Senegal’s President Léopold Sédar Senghor, celebrated black creativity and drew participants from across the Afro-Asian world.

These festivals showcased what historian Penny Von Eschen calls the “global conversation of the decolonising world.”  They were both celebrations and battlegrounds — stages on which nations competed to define the meaning of freedom.  For instance, at the Dakar festival, Négritude’s vision of black cultural pride met debates over socialism and modernity.  In Cairo, Nasser’s regime used cultural spectacle to promote Arab leadership within the Bandung coalition.

The Bandung Aesthetic: Style, Identity, and Resistance

What united these diverse artistic expressions was not a single style, but a shared sensibility — a Bandung aesthetic.  This aesthetic fused realism with idealism, political critique with spiritual renewal.  It rejected the Cold War’s binary of “freedom” versus “collectivism” and instead sought to imagine the world from the perspective of the formerly colonised.

The Bandung aesthetic can be seen in the earthy realism of African literature, the allegorical cinema of Southeast Asia, and the epic poetry of the Arab world.  It often emphasised community over individuality, struggle over consumption, and the search for justice over the pursuit of profit.

Art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu describes this aesthetic as a “transnational modernism” — not derivative of Paris or Moscow, but arising from Lagos, Delhi, and Jakarta.  Bandung thus helped globalise modernism, decentring it from the West.

Even architecture reflected this new consciousness.  In Accra, Delhi, and Cairo, modernist public buildings symbolised both national pride and international cooperation.  Indonesian architects drew inspiration from traditional forms while experimenting with concrete and glass — a visual metaphor for postcolonial hybridity.

Cultural Contradictions and Cold War Pressures

Yet, as with politics, the cultural Bandung was not without contradictions.  Many of the new states that championed artistic freedom also practiced censorship at home.  Egypt’s state-controlled film industry glorified Nasser’s regime even as it suppressed dissent.  In Indonesia, Sukarno’s government initially celebrated artistic freedom but later, during the anti-communist purges of 1965–66, persecuted leftist artists associated with the Lekra (People’s Cultural Institute).

The Bandung aesthetic’s independence was further tested by the economic realities of cultural production.  The lack of infrastructure, funding, and international distribution meant that most Afro-Asian films and literature circulated within limited regional networks.  Western publishers and distributors continued to dominate the global market.  Even so, the 1960s witnessed a surge in South–South exchanges: Indian studios collaborated with Nigeria; China exported films to Tanzania; and Egypt trained African cinematographers at its national film school.

By the 1970s, as the Non-Aligned Movement gained momentum, cultural cooperation became more institutionalised.  The Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool (1976) and the Third World Cinema Committee (1973) aimed to create alternative channels of information and storytelling.  Directors like Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, and Glauber Rocha explicitly identified themselves as “children of Bandung.”  Their films — Black Girl (1966), Yeelen (1987), Terra em Transe (1967) — embodied the same defiant cosmopolitanism that Bandung had inaugurated.

Bandung’s Afterlife: From the NIEO to Global Culture Today

By the late 1970s, the cultural phase of Bandung entered a new institutional form through the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and the UNESCO debates on cultural diversity.  Developing countries argued that cultural production was part of economic sovereignty and demanded fairer terms for global exchange.  The “McBride Report” (1980), commissioned by UNESCO, echoed Bandung’s call for a more balanced global flow of information — a proposal fiercely opposed by the United States and Britain.

Although many of these initiatives faltered amid debt crises and neoliberal reforms, the Bandung ideal of cultural equality continued to influence artists and activists.  In the 1990s and 2000s, global art biennales in Havana, Dakar, and Sharjah revived Afro-Asian and Arab-Asian connections.  Contemporary filmmakers such as Haile Gerima, Ava DuVernay, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have cited the Bandung generation as an inspiration for their politically engaged work.

The concept of “Global South cinema” — now widely used in film studies — can be traced directly to the networks and aesthetics that Bandung helped spawn.  Similarly, modern calls for “decolonising museums” and “rebalancing world culture” owe much to Bandung’s original insistence that no civilisation holds a monopoly on beauty or truth.

Conclusion: Art as the Memory of Bandung

The Bandung Conference was a diplomatic summit, but its deeper legacy was cultural.  It invited the formerly colonised world to imagine itself anew — not through borrowed European ideals, but through shared creative expression.

In the decades that followed, art, film, and literature became the vocabulary of solidarity.  Indian and Egyptian cinema, African novels, Arab poetry, and Asian modernist painting together formed a global conversation that defied imperial hierarchies.  The Bandung aesthetic was not about rejecting the West, but about recentring the world — showing that modernity could emerge from the Global South itself.

Even after the Cold War faded, the questions Bandung raised — about cultural autonomy, artistic freedom, and the politics of representation — remain alive.  Every debate about decolonising knowledge, every collaboration among artists across continents, is part of Bandung’s unfinished project.

In the realm of culture, at least, the Bandung spirit endures — not as nostalgia, but as an ongoing demand: that the stories of humanity be told by all its peoples, on their own terms.