From Bandung to Salvador da Bahia, via Luanda: Africa, Asia, and the Brazilian quest for identity and equality, 1959-…

Historical appraisals of African and Asian Studies usually focus on developments in Europe or the United States, and only recently have started to pay more attention to the scholarship produced within Asia and Africa themselves and their contributions to the making of these fields of knowledge. However, cross-continental interest along what is now called the ‘Global South’ was a key component of the intellectual landscape since the 1950s, fueled by the ‘spirit of Bandung’ which helped make the ‘Third World’ into a self-affirming global driving force. In Northeastern Brazil, a Center for Afro-Oriental Studies (CEAO) was founded in 1959, a time of lively national democratic debate, when a country-wide university system was being built, and social and racial inequalities were brought forward by social movements and scholars alike as main hindrances for modernization. Looking to the emergent Asian countries vying for true sovereignty and autonomous economic development in Asia and the struggle for independence in Africa (especially the meaning of racial discrimination for the colonial order and its demise), CEAO scholars linked domestic and international developments in their participation on the national debate on identity and equality, facing political, social and economical constraints along time. This paper aims to discuss the experience of the CEAO, in its institutional and scholarly aspects, and its place in the producing and circulation knowledge on Latin America, Africa and Asia, in order to join the ongoing conversation about the ‘crossways of knowledge’ linking our continents, and help to broaden our academic networks.