Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions
256
Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions
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Overview
This book focuses on Bandung not only as a political and institutional platform, but also as a cultural and spiritual moment, in which formerly colonized peoples came together as global subjects who, with multiple entanglements and aspirations, co-imagined and deliberated on a just settlement to the colonial global order. It conceives of Bandung not just as a concrete political moment but also as an affective touchstone for inquiring into the meaning of the decolonial project more generally. In sum, the book attends to what remains woefully under-studied: Bandung as the enunciation of a different globalism, an alternative web of relationships across multiple borders, and an-other archive of sensibilities, desires as well as fears.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783485666 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/02/2016 |
| Series: | Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Robbie Shilliam is author of The Black Pacific (Bloomsbury Academic Press) and German Thought and International Relations (Palgrave). He is co-convener of the BISA Colonial, Postcolonial and Decolonial Working group, a correspondent of the Transnational Decolonial Institute, and co-editor of the book series Kilombo: International Relations and Colonial Questions (Rowman & Littlefield International).
Read an Excerpt
Meanings of Bandung
Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions
By Quynh N. Pham, Robbie Shilliam
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Quynh N. Pham and Robbie ShilliamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-566-6
CHAPTER 1
Reviving Bandung
Quynh N. Pham and Robbie Shilliam
INTRODUCTION
"[T]his hall is filled not only by the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa; it also contains within its walls the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before us," declared Indonesian president Sukarno, as he hosted twenty-nine nations of Asia and Africa from April 18 to 24 in 1955 (Asia-Africa Speaks 1955). These newly independent nations met in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss the present condition and future prospects of international relations. Upon reading the news of this historic gathering a few months before, African American writer Richard Wright, even from remote Paris, instantly realized its empire-shaking significance: "[T]his is the human race speaking" (Wright 1956: 11–13). Wright felt compelled to go and witness "the agenda and subject matter" that "had been written for centuries in the blood and bones of the participants." Both Sukarno's solemn tribute to "those who went before" and Wright's thrilled "stream of realizations" that "[t]his smacked of something new, something beyond Left and Right" suggest that the meanings of the event, what is known nowadays as the "Bandung Conference" or simply "Bandung," far exceed the standard narratives of geopolitics, diplomacy and ethics.
It is not that certain conventions of international relations cannot be read into the conference. It has been argued that among the major concerns for its five original sponsors – Burma, Indonesia, India, Ceylon and Pakistan – were diffusing growing tensions between China and the United States, decreasing polarization between the two ideological poles of the Cold War, and addressing the destructive power of nuclear and thermo-nuclear explosions (e.g. Kahin 1956). However, it is telling that the few engagements with Bandung in the field of International Relations have tended to place it entirely within already-existing theoretical problematiques. Apart from the predominant focus on strategic self-interest and statesmanship, Bandung was, in the estimation of English Schooler Martin Wight (1987: 224–225), an example of "Kantian moral solidarity" in action, that is, an attempt to "sweep away evil" from international society (see also Jackson 2005: 66). More recently, Roland Burke (2010: 13–34) has placed Bandung as a landmark in the evolution of the United Nations and its mission to promote universal human rights. Alternatively, others past and present have seen in Bandung something less of a global Kantian revolution or human rights evolution and more of an emergent Asian "regionalism" (Brecher 1963; Tan & Acharya 2008).
Nevertheless, it is possible to glean in some scholarly interventions a resonance with Richard Wright's reading of Bandung and its reverberation in both the Global North and South. For example, in a special issue of Daedalus published in the aftermath of the infamous Watts Riots in Los Angeles in 1965, Robert Gardiner (1967: 302) suggested that Bandung signalled a "renewed self-respect" of colonized peoples in their vehement rejection of the "white man's standards." Likewise, in the aftermath of the so-called race riots in London, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool in 1981, Robert Vincent (1982: 668) contextualized Bandung within a global politics of race that sought to dismantle "white superiority" in the service of "the principle of racial equality." Although primarily filtered through a lens of "race" and "colour," these direct allusions to global systems of colonial rule mark a crucial hermeneutic excess that Bandung holds for IR.
This book examines the excess of meanings invoked by Bandung in order to understand and reflect on the affinities, visions and projects of decolonization that shaped international relations in the twentieth century, and that continue to do so. Moving away from conventional frames, we, as editors, are convinced that Bandung, while important in and of itself as a diplomatic event, is also a political and affective touchstone that can help to illuminate the life of other international relations, besides those of the hegemonic West and its theoretical narrations of global order. These other international relations are not "other-worldly"; they operate in this world, but through non-conventional points of departures, thought systems, archives, sensibilities, aspirations and practices that variously contest, provincialize or re-entangle themselves with the global-colonial projection of power and order. They are populated by peoples who connect, who resonate – sometimes disharmoniously – across diverse but relatable perspectives, stories and projects. These international relations may not always be visible or audible, but they are lived, and thus make a difference to the way the world is imagined, inhabited and adjusted to multiple life practices, convivialities and globalities.
In pursuit of this retrieval of meanings, the book is divided into two sections. Addressing the affective-corporeal relations with regard to the Asian-African Conference of 1955 as well as what comes before and after it, the first section explores Bandung as a way of sensing international-as-intimate relations. Here the chapters trace what Walter Mignolo (2011) calls the "body-politics of knowing/sensing/understanding" in his discussion on decoloniality, the Bandung Conference and the Third World more broadly. Contributors to the first section walk us into an international relations experienced through the memories, speeches, songs, names, symbols, poetry, fragrances and smells that texture, often contentiously, Bandung's political and cultural intimacies. Notably, these intimacies have been in the making long before the 1955 conference.
The second section seeks to resituate Bandung in both historical and contemporary contexts, and to reintroduce pivotal, albeit forgotten or maligned, contexts to the study of international relations. This section locates Bandung beyond the narrow Cold War security framework commonplace in IR scholarship in order to approach the conference as a conspicuous episode in a long history of rallies against old and new forms of colonial domination. Contributors examine the diverse ethico-political imaginaries of the global that both made Bandung possible and emerged out of it. As they do so, they critically investigate the affinities and alliances as well as the tensions and contradictions that permeated Bandung.
We propose that working through the multiple senses and lineages of Bandung helps to cultivate understandings of international relations that are better attuned to the postcolonial predicaments and decolonizing impulses that frame contemporary struggles over global order. As editors, we are attentive to the intricate dynamics of these predicaments and impulses within colonial orders. Indeed, recent investigations disclose the many strictures, tensions and ambiguities between local, national and global projects that intersected at the conference (see Lee 2010; McDougall & Finnane 2010; Vitalis 2013; Roberts & Foulcher 2016). At the same time, we are committed to the premise that the colonial order never was – and never is – all encompassing. Hence, the contributions across both sections engage with Bandung beyond romantic or pessimistic gestures in order to capture the complexity of the promises and processes of decolonizing international relations.
In what follows, we provide a primer for both sections of the volume and introduce the individual contributions. First, we dwell on the affective and temporal dimensions of Bandung to consider the ways in which sensing it intimately generates meanings that exceed those garnered solely from a focus on self-interested or ideological engagements. Having traced this broader and deeper constellation of meanings, we then sketch out the lineages of struggle within which Bandung can be situated as a crucial intervention into global order, lineages yet to be grasped in IR.
SENSING BANDUNG
The Bandung Conference is remarkable insofar as it provided the first diplomatic space in twentieth century international relations that promised an intimacy among colonized and postcolonized peoples. This space, in significant ways, defied the geopolitical borders that most attendees inherited from colonial cartographies. In particular, the conference resonated far beyond the diplomatic circles that largely constituted its immediate audience. Intensely felt, the resonance spoke to existing intimacies that bore many names, ranging from friendship to companionship, from solidarity to brotherhood/sisterhood, from neighbourliness to kinship. Invoked by statesmen and commoners alike, sung in prose-poetry and diverse vernacular tongues, these intimacies, we propose, are vital to both the making and the making sense of Bandung. Emerging out of profound bonded and bonding histories, these intimacies embody political sensibilities. They entwine with wide-ranging emotions and experiences, including euphoria as well as anguish, and fidelity as well as estrangement.
To borrow the image from Egyptian poet Fuad Haddad, "the white dove from Bandung sp[oke] in rhyme" across the world. In her chapter, Khadija El Alaoui draws from Algerian thinker Malek Bennabi to argue that Bandung represented the opportunity for both the moral renewal of colonized societies and a global politics of grounding with neighbours. In her critical analysis, poets and dissidents kept the promises of Bandung alive despite, paradoxically, authoritarian punishment by anti-colonial leaders such as Egypt's Abdel Nasser. Where statesmen and intellectuals of North Africa fail to pursue decolonial aspirations to full effect, El Alaoui turns to "Street Bandung," especially in the vernacular rhyme of people's poets who "embody Bandung in their conversations" with neighbours across traditions and across struggles for justice. If artistic media such as poetry has been crucial to the transmission of the Bandung spirit, Rachmi Diyah Larasati's chapter alerts us to the duality of the artistic form, especially in the contemporary dominant order. She provocatively asks, "Is it possible to hold the political value of the artistic form as an embodiment of memory and a decolonizing process while functioning in a neoliberal spatial configuration?" Recollecting the suppressed memories of Bandung in the context of Indonesia's silenced past and her own family's experiences, Larasati ponders the layered and displaced meanings of images of Che Guevera and the song "Guantanamera" in Indonesia.
Bandung reverberated even in the West. Despite mainly hostile and condescending reactions from its dominant representatives, "the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed" who resided there felt the extraordinary nature of Bandung (Wright 1956). This subaltern excitement was exemplified, for instance, in Richard Wright's report The Color Curtain (1956: 12): "It was the kind of meeting that no anthropologist, no sociologist, no political scientist would ever have dreamed of staging; it was too simple, too elementary. ... There was something extra-political, extra-social, almost extra-human about it; it smacked of tidal waves, of natural forces. ..." Less well known than Wright's now popular account was the enthusiasm that Bandung aroused among African American editors and journalists, some of whom applied for passports to attend only to be rejected by the US State Department (Plummer 1996: 248). Likewise, rejections were visited upon W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson who sent messages of support instead (Fraser 2003: 135). "How I should have loved to be at Bandung," began Robeson's "heartfelt greetings" and deep regrets at missing this momentous (re)union. "In your midst are old friends I knew in London years ago, where I first became part of the movement for colonial freedom" (Foner 1978: 398–400). Inspired by Bandung, Malcolm X (1963) considered it a model to create unity among black people in the United States. The African American press hailed the conference as a "product of 500 years" of European colonial atrocities (Rogers 1966) and a "clear challenge to white supremacy" that "might well prove to be a turning point in world history" ("Afro-Asian Conference" 1955). The press also asserted that Bandung enabled the subsequent "whippings" of colonial states at the United Nations over issues of self-determination such as the freedom of Algeria from France (Hicks 1955a, 1955b).
The profound and visceral attachments to Bandung around the world are steeped in long and violent histories. They become intelligible only if we understand the 1955 conference as a formally diplomatic expression of anti-colonial sentiments and connections that long preceded the Cold War context of decolonization. Some brief examples will be instructive.
The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) is now well known for resonating with anti-colonial movements near and far. Independent Haiti gave material aid to Bolivar's struggles for independence in Latin America; meanwhile, the revolution proved instructive for the Maori King Movement's wars against settlers in 1860s' Aotearoa (New Zealand). Likewise, the victory of Ethiopian forces over the Italian army at Adwa in 1896 demonstrated to the Maori the vulnerability of European colonial forces, and a commentary on Emperor Menelik II's victory even appeared in the newspaper of the Maori Parliament movement (Shilliam 2015a: 117). After Adwa, the sovereign independence of Ethiopia took on especial importance for those in the African diaspora who had long prophesied through Psalms 68:31 their redemption from enslaved pasts and impoverished presents: "Princes shall come out of Egypt, Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands towards God" (see Shilliam 2013; Jonas 2011). And when Italy returned to invade Ethiopia in 1935 with a fascist army, pro-Ethiopian sentiments were evident across the world. T. B. Allotey, an itinerant merchant from Accra, even managed to establish an Ethiopian Society in Tokyo ("An African British Subject Tells of Ethiopia" 1936).
These anti-colonial affections variously carried on into the Cold War era and were thus contemporaneous with Bandung. They were echoed in Frantz Fanon's affirmation of the global significance of Dien Biên Phu – the battle that decisively won the Vietnamese liberation from colonial France:
The great victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Biên Phu is no longer strictly speaking a Vietnamese victory. From July 1954 onward the colonial peoples have been asking themselves: "What must we do to achieve a Dien Biên Phu? How should we go about it?" A Dien Biên Phu was now within reach of every colonized subject. (Fanon 2004: 30–31)
It was revealing when African American activist and singer Paul Robeson declared in 1954: "Ho Chi Minh is the Toussaint L'Overture of Indo-China" (Foner 1978: 377–379). Che Guevera (1967) would go further and claim that solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle was "not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his[/her] fate." When the hands and feet of colonized peoples were still shackled, battles like Dien Biên Phu and revolts elsewhere actualized for them the dance for and of freedom. Witnessed Guyanese poet Martin Carter (1951):
And no matter where I turn
the fierce revolt goes with me
like a kiss
The revolt of Malaya
And Viet Nam
The revolt of India
And Africa
Like guardian.
Like guardian at my side
Is the fight for freedom –
And like the whole world dancing
For liberation from the slave maker
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Meanings of Bandung by Quynh N. Pham, Robbie Shilliam. Copyright © 2016 Quynh N. Pham and Robbie Shilliam. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
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