From Bandung to Little Rock: Dalip Singh Saund and the Limits of Racial Liberalism

ABSTRACT This essay briefly examines the state-sponsored journey of Dalip Singh Saund – the first Asian American, Indian American, and Sikh American to be elected to the United States Congress – across Asia in the winter of 1957–1958 alongside the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. As an ambassador of American efforts to put forward a new and conciliatory face on the issue of race in the United States, Saund was deployed not only as symbol of American ideals and universality, but also as part of broader U.S. state efforts to counter worldwide criticism of U.S. racism, to build relations with emerging Asian and African nations, and to contain the possibility of a radical restructuring of the global racial and economic order. Saund used his cultural authority as a formerly excluded immigrant and, as he saw, fully assimilated citizen to celebrate a racially liberal order at home and to reframe histories of racial exclusion into triumphant stories of national inclusion. Saund’s racial liberalism served as a precursor to the conservative and neoconservative responses to race that would emerge in the coming decades, responses that downplayed the persistent and structural nature of U.S. racism and suppressed the kinds of anticolonial and antiracist critiques and demonstrations of Afro-Asian solidarity emerging from sites like Bandung.