Also streamed Live via Zoom. Please register here for
Friday, May 23
Saturday, May 24
 

Conception: Benjamin Zachariah, Potsdam, and Jolita Zabarskaitė, Bonn
With Andrea Benvenuti, Sydney; Kingshuk Chatterjee, Calcutta; Carlos Fraenkel, Montreal; Bernd Greiner, Hamburg; Vera Mey, London; Philippe Pirotte, Brussels; Indah Wahyu Puji Utami, Malang; Robert Vitalis, Philadelphia

In April 1955, representatives of twenty-nine Asian and African countries met in Bandung, Indonesia, for a conference that was, among other things, the first major diplomatic gathering to which the People’s Republic of China was invited. When it is remembered at all, memories of the Bandung Conference have overpowered its history: Its afterlife is recalled mostly in terms of nostalgia for Afro-Asian solidarity, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Cold War. This conference seeks, seventy years on, to revisit Bandung’s hauntings or hangovers in history, memory, and other forms of narratives and retellings.

 
Program
 
Friday, May 23, 2025

11:00
Welcome address: Susan Neiman

Introductory remarks: Bandung’s Reproductivity and the Road from the Third World to the Global South
Jolita Zabarskaitė and Benjamin Zachariah

11:45
Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte
Who’s Afraid of the Bandung Spirit?

14:30
Kingshuk Chatterjee
Where the Spirit was Willing but the Flesh was Weak: How Bandung was Lost to Geopolitics

16:00
Robert Vitalis
World-Myth-Making After Bandung

17:15
Carlos Fraenkel
Beyond a Binary: Victims of Victims and the Limits of the Colonizer–Colonized Paradigm

 
Saturday, May 24, 2025

11:00
Andrea Benvenuti
Nehru’s Bandung

12:15
Jolita Zabarskaite
Bandung, Greater India, Indonesia: Incompatible Visions of (Afro-)Asia?

15:00
Benjamin Zachariah
Anniversaries and Travelling Conferences: Brussels, Delhi, Bandung, Belgrade, and the Road from the Third World to the Global South

16:30
Indah Wahyu Puji Utame
Remembering Bandung: How the 1955 Asian African Conference is Taught, Understood, and Misremembered in Indonesia

17:45
Bernd Greiner in conversation with Benjamin Zachariah
Roads Not Taken