I propose to read and report provisionally on the past decade of scholarship in the social sciences and international history on the 1955 Asian-African Conference, and on work in the critical humanities, political theory, and area and ethnic studies on the world-making ambitions that Bandung purportedly gave rise to before its visionaries were defeated by “neoliberalism.” My tentative hypothesis is that the presentism that affected an earlier generation of Third Worldist studies is at play today in influential new works. Alternately, the problem, if it exists, may simply reflect what political scientist Gabriel Almond said was a normal tendency to caricature and simplify past scholarship “in order to establish independent intellectual ground on which to stand.” If so, we are also likely to find that the work repeats past mistakes and discovers that which was commonly known. I also want to suggest a direction for work going forward, which follows from my own research on the erasure of radical conservatives from our histories of the Global South. I am mostly focused on U.S. defense intellectuals during the early Cold War era who have long since been erased from histories of the relevant disciplines. What I have discovered is that there is a connection to Bandung in the founding of what would become the World Anticommunist League (WACL). WACL belongs to the same moment as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the New International Economic Order (NIEO)—and yet there is virtually no serious scholarship on it and its allies.