Bandung as a Plurality of Meanings (original) (raw)

Abstract

Our conversations about the 1955 Bandung Conference started in the sum- mer of 2014. Rosalba Icaza (RI) witnessed an informal but intense exchange between Tamara Soukotta (TS) and Walter Mignolo on the contemporary legacies of Bandung. Tamara expressed doubts about Walter’s argument on Bandung as setting the historical foundations of decoloniality in global poli- tics, developed in his article “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing” (2011).1 The present text is the outcome of various conversations that followed this first debate that we held between July 2014 and January 2016. All of our conversations, except the last one, were informal, brief and constantly inter- rupted by urgent personal-professional concerns. All of them were conducted in English as our lingua franca. Our last conversation was the only one that we agreed to record and transcripts were produced and circulated between us from which a first draft was agreed upon. As we have known each other for over a period of seven years, start- ing a conversation was not difficult. However, we realized that it had been extremely rare to find moments and spaces to hold deep conversations about the meanings that each of us attach to Bandung and as part of our own personal-professional-epistemic trajectories. Therefore these conversations have been an opportunity for us to learn about each other as much as we have learnt about the plurality of meanings that Bandung inspires in us as the first international conference of “people of color” and a place of local histories in West Java, Indonesia. This version of the text also aims to reflect that the meanings that each of us assigns to Bandung are in relation to our present interactions as two female colleagues of “Southern” origin doing research in a European University andwho share a commitment to struggles for liberation and autonomy of West Papuan people in Indonesia (TS) and of Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico (RI). Rosalba had already explored auto-ethnography (Icaza 2015; Barbosa da Costa, Icaza and Talero 2015) in a dialogical way as developed by Mexican anthropologist Leyva Solano (2013), who speaks of about it as “a kind of praxis of research of co-labor (collaborative research) in which the written text is a dialogue with the spoken and written word, with visuality, with past and present experiences and with the imagined horizon of autonomy.” This way of working was agreed upon as our joint reflexive path. Overall, this text aims to be an account of the multidimensional process of this reflexive path: a dialogue between each other on our different under- standings about Bandung but that are nonetheless deeply interconnected to our own political-personal-epistemic trajectories, and to our flourishing friendship as part of a learning community of students and colleagues-friends in the city of The Hague. As such, this chapter aims to demonstrate that our personal accounts of what Bandung means to us are intertwined but are also arising from and in relation to that community of colleagues-friends (see Icaza 2015). In so doing, this written version of our spoken words uncovers the road trav- elled in a dialogical process of writing an “academic” reflection. The chosen path is critical self-reflection on the already walked route – our conversations and joint intellectual ruminations – which are rarely visible in “academic” texts, but that nonetheless direct our in-company walking/thinking/sensing. To shed light on this is our way of countering the dominant narratives surround- ing the generation of “academic” knowledge as if these were individual(ized) endeavours and coming from no place, no temporality, no memories. What follows is a dialogue broken in several sections of different exten- sions that address different themes about Bandung. We chose them keeping in mind a key question: What does Bandung mean to us − the female- teachers-researchers-activists of southern origin based in northern academia?

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