Indonesian Notebook
A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7306316 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jason Thomas Parker (corresponding author), Jason Parker (0000-0001-9227-6976) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 251-252 |
| Publication date | 2017-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jax113 |
| OpenAlex | W2721319218 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Few historical events—perhaps the Woodstock musical festival comes close—have generated the quasi-historical and even ahistorical mythos of the April 1955 Afro-Asian Peoples Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia. That conclave brought together twenty-nine newly independent and soon-to-be independent states from across the global South, though principally from Asia and the Middle East, to formulate a shared agenda for the end of empire and the political and socioeconomic progress of former wards. Though notable for its affirmation of a kind of protoneutralism in the Cold War—remarkable given that most attendees were not “neutrals” in any geopolitically meaningful sense of the term—and of an agenda of economic development, the event was perhaps best remembered for what came to be called the “spirit of Bandung.” This spirit, expressed intermittently at the conference, entailed a vague if powerful sense of destiny to be achieved through solidarity among formerly imperialized peoples. As Christopher J. Lee, Robert Vitalis, John Munro, and others have pointed out, this spirit took on a life of its own through the popular and scholarly memory of the conference, prompting visions of Kwame Nkrumah at the conference podium when he did not, in fact, make the trip to Bandung. A leading contemporary chronicler of this spirit was the African American novelist Richard Wright. He attended the conference, stayed in Indonesia for three weeks afterward, and published an influential account of his travels entitled The Color Curtain (1956). Wright reveled in the prospect of transracial solidarity across the global South, connecting the region spiritually and philosophically to the black freedom movement burgeoning in the U.S. South
Art history · Indonesian · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Vision · Wright · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · History · Law · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2023 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |