Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South
Duncan M Yoon2018, The Global South and Literature, Cambridge University Press
Since 1955 there has been a proliferation of publications commemorating the Asia-Africa Conference of Bandung, ranging from official government documents and conferences, to the recent uptick in scholarship in the Western academy embodied in part by the Global South turn (Lee 2010). What explains this continued nostalgia for Bandung over sixty years later? And, moreover, can this “Bandung nostalgia” be at all useful for Global South studies, eschewing the pitfalls associated with an “illusion of utopian idealism” in order to “provid[e] knowledge of legitimate alternatives to present circumstances” (Huffer, qtd. in Su 2005: 8)? This chapter will focus on the mobilization of culture at Bandung, including the citation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore by the Pilipino delegate Carlos Romulo. Although scholarship on Bandung is often susceptible to the pitfalls of nostalgia, nevertheless this chapter argues that this “Bandung nostalgia” can be mobilized in critical ways, informing contemporary scholarship on the Global South. As such the Global South is understood as a concept rather than merely a geography, accommodating for the opening of “new departures” in geo-cultural patterns, and thereby continuing the “unfinished critique” of postcolonialism.