Making a World after Empire

The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives

Christopher J. Lee, Christopher J. Lee

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780896805057
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Ostensibly representing two-thirds of the world's population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new Cold War world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the Cold War interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays collected here explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that ensued as well as addressing the broader intersection of postcolonial and Cold War history. With a new foreword by Vijay Prashad and a new preface by the editor, Making a World after Empire speaks to contemporary discussions of decolonization, Third Worldism, and the emergence of the Global South, thus reestablishing the conference's importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, and Denis M. Tull.

Part 1

Framings

Concepts, Politics, History

1

The Legacies of Bandung

Decolonization and the Politics of Culture

Dipesh Chakrabarty

THE URGE TO decolonize, to be rid of the colonizer in every possible way, was internal to all anticolonial criticism after the end of World War I. Postcolonial critics of our times, on the other hand, have emphasized how the colonial situation produced forms of hybridity or mimicry that necessarily escaped the Manichean logic of the colonial encounter.¹ It is not only this intellectual shift that separates anticolonial and postcolonial criticism. The two genres have also been separated by the political geographies and histories of their origins. After all, the demand for political and intellectual decolonization arose mainly in the colonized countries among the intellectuals of anticolonial movements. Postcolonial writing and criticism, on the other hand, was born in the West. They were influenced by anticolonial criticism but their audiences were at the beginning in the West itself, for these writings have been an essential part of the struggle to make the liberal-capitalist (and, initially, mainly Anglo-American) Western democracies more democratic with respect to their immigrant, minority, and indigenous—though there have been tensions between these groups—populations. Race has thus figured as a category central to postcolonial criticism whereas its position in anticolonial discourse varies. The question of race is crucial to the formulations of Fanon, Césaire, or C. L. R. James, for example, but it is not as central to how a Gandhi or a Tagore thought about colonial domination. If historically, then, anticolonialism has been on the wane since the 1960s and displaced by postcolonial discourse in the closing decades of the 20th century, it has been further pointed out by more-recent critics of postcolonial theory and writing that even the postcolonial moment is now behind us, its critical clamor having been drowned in turn by the mighty tide of globalization.²

This seemingly easy periodization of the 20th century—anticolonialism giving way to postcolonial criticism giving way to globalization—is unsettled if we look closely at discussions about decolonization that marked the 1950s and the 1960s. Ideas regarding decolonization were dominated by two concerns. One was development. The other I will call "dialogue." Many anticolonial thinkers considered colonialism as something of a broken promise. European rule, it was said, promised modernization but did not deliver on it. As Césaire said in his Discourse on Colonialism (1955):

[I]t is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them . . . it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on this score . . . it is the colonized man who wants to move forward, and the colonizer who holds things back.³

This was the developmentalist side of decolonization whereby anti-colonial thinkers came to accept different versions of modernization theory that in turn made the West into a model for everyone to follow. This today may very well seem dated but it has not lost its relevance. One consequence of this developmentalism was a cultural style of politics that I call pedagogical. In the pedagogical mode, the very performance of politics reenacted civilizational or cultural hierarchies: between nations, between classes, or between the leaders and the masses. Those lower down in the hierarchy were meant to learn from those higher up. Leaders, when they spoke in this mode, were like teachers. But there was also another side to decolonization that has received less scholarly attention. Anticolonial thinkers often devoted a great deal of time to the question of whether or how a global conversation of humanity could genuinely acknowledge cultural diversity without distributing such diversity over a hierarchical scale of civilization—that is to say, an urge toward cross-cultural dialogue without the baggage of imperialism. Let me call it the dialogical side of decolonization. Here, unlike on the pedagogical side, there was no one model to follow. Different thinkers took different positions, and it is the richness of their contradictions that speaks directly to the fundamental concerns of both postcolonial criticism and globalization theory. That indeed may be where the global movement toward decolonization left us a heritage useful for the world, even today.

In what follows, I track these two aspects of the language of decolonization, starting with the historic conference in Bandung, where some six hundred leaders and delegates of twenty-nine newly independent countries from Asia and Africa met between April 18 and 24, 1955, to exchange views of the world at a time when the cold war and a new United Nations regime were already important factors in international relations. (On the conference itself, see also the introduction to this volume by Christopher Lee.)⁴ It may be timely to remind ourselves of a recent moment in human history when the idea of nation was something people aspired to and the idea of empire wielded absolutely no moral force. Today the opposite rules: the theme of empire has made a triumphant return in historiography whereas the nation-state has fallen out of favor. Historians of Niall Ferguson’s ilk even seem to recommend a return to imperial arrangements in the interest of a decent global future for mankind.⁵ For some critics from the Left too, empire, variously understood, has become a key operative term for understanding global relations of domination as they exist at present.⁶ It may be salutary today to revisit a time when both the category empire and actual, historical European empires truly seem to have seen the sun set over them.

Dateline: Bandung, April 1955

In 1955 when Richard Wright, the noted African American writer then resident in Paris, decided to attend the Bandung Conference, many of his European friends thought this would be an occasion simply for criticizing the West. Even Gunner Myrdal, in contributing the foreword to the book that Wright wrote as a result of his experience at Bandung, ended up penning an indictment of what happened in Bandung: “His [Wright’s] interest was focused on the two powerful urges far beyond Left and Right which he found at work there: Religion and Race. . . . Asia and Africa thus carry the irrationalism of both East and West.”⁷ Both Myrdal and Wright’s Parisian friends appear to have misjudged what decolonization was all about. It was not a simple project of cultivating a sense of disengagement with the West. There was no reverse racism at work in Bandung. If anything, the aspiration for political and economic freedom that the Conference stood for entailed a long and troubled conversation with an imagined Europe or the West. “I was discovering,” wrote Wright, “that this Asian elite was, in many ways, more Western than the West, their Westernness consisting in their having been made to break with the past in a manner that but few Westerners could possible do.”⁸ It was in fact the newsmen from his own country that attended the conference who, Wright felt, “had no philosophy of history with which to understand Bandung.”⁹

I will shortly come to this question of the philosophy of history that marked the discourse of decolonization. For now, let me simply note the historical moment when the conference met. The Bandung Conference was held at a time when currents of deep and widespread sympathy with the newly independent nations—or with those struggling to be independent (such as Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Central Africa, etc.)—met those of the cold war. Treaties, unsatisfactory to the United States, had been signed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The French had lost in Dien Bien Phu and the Korean War had ended. Some of the Asian nations had joined defense pacts with the United States: Pakistan, Thailand, and the Philippines. Some others belonged to the Socialist Bloc. Bandung was attempting to sustain a sense of Asian-African affinity in the face of such disagreements. This was not easy as there was pressure from the Western countries to influence the course of the conversation at Bandung by excluding China, for example. Nehru’s correspondence with the United Nations makes it obvious that sometimes he had to stand his ground on the question of neutrality in the cold war. A letter he wrote to the Secretary General of the United Nation dated December 18, 1954, on the subject of Bandung, reads:

We have no desire to create a bad impression about anything in the US and the UK. But the world is somewhat larger than the US and the UK and we have to take into account what impressions we create in the rest of the world. . . . For us to be told, therefore, that the US and the UK will not like the inclusion of China in the Afro-Asian Conference is not very helpful. In fact, it is somewhat irritating. There are many things that the US and the UK have done which we do not like at all.¹⁰

The leaders who got together in Bandung thus came from a divided world. They were not of the same mind on questions of international politics, nor did they have the same understanding of what constituted imperialism. They did not even necessarily like each other. The representative of the Philippines, Carlos Romulo, for example, found Nehru to be a “highly cultivated intellect” but full of “pedantry” (and one might add opposed—as a believer in nonalignment—to the Manila Pact of which the Philippines were a member). “His pronounced propensity to be dogmatic, impatient, irascible, and unyielding . . . alienated the goodwill of many delegates,” writes Romulo. Nehru “typified” for him “the affectations of cultural superiority induced by a conscious identification with an ancient civilization which has come to be the hallmark of Indian representatives to international conferences. He also showed an anti-American complex, which is characteristic of Indian representations at international diplomatic meetings.” India, Romulo judged, was “not so much anti-West as it is anti-American.”¹¹

The memoir of Dr. Roeslan Abdulgani, once Jakarta’s ambassador to the United States and an organizer of the conference, reflects some of the competitive currents that characterized the relationship between the Indian and the Indonesian leadership and officials. “The cleverness of the Indian delegation,” he writes, “lay in the fact that they had thoroughly mastered the English language, and had very much experience in negotiations with the British. . . . Some of them were even arrogant as for instance . . . Krishna Menon, and, at times, Prime Minister Nehru himself.”¹² Nehru, in turn, had trouble trusting the Indonesians with the responsibility of organizing the conference. He wrote to B. F. H. B. Tyabji, the Indian Ambassador to Indonesia, on February 20, 1955: “I am rather anxious about this Asian-African Conference and, more especially, about the arrangements. I wonder if the people in Indonesia have any full realization of what this Conference is going to be. All the world’s eyes will be turned upon it. . . . Because of all this, we cannot take the slightest risk of lack of adequate arrangements. . . . You have been pointing out that the Indonesians are sensitive. We should respect their sensitiveness. But we cannot afford to have anything messed up because they are sensitive. . . .”¹³ His particular concern, it turns out, were the arrangements for bathrooms and lavatories. It is hard to know whether he was being merely anxious or expressing a peculiar Brahmanical obsession with ritual purity and cleanliness when he went on to say: “I have learnt that it is proposed to crowd numbers of people in single rooms. . . . your Joint Secretariat will not get much praise from anybody if delegates are herded up like cattle. . . . Above all, one fact should be remembered, and this is usually forgotten in Indonesia. This fact is an adequate provision for bathrooms and lavatories. People can do without drawing rooms, but they cannot do without bathrooms and lavatories.”¹⁴

Apart from the lack of mutual trust and respect, the conference, so opposed to imperialism, had no operative definition of the term. This was so mainly because there were deep and irreconcilable differences among the nations represented. The Prime Minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Sir John Kotelawala, caused some tension in the Political Committee of the conference—and shocked Nehru—when on the afternoon of Thursday, April 21, 1955, referring t...