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

Conference
Friday, May 23 – Saturday, May 24, 2025

Einstein Forum
Am Neuen Markt 7
14467 Potsdam

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

Conception: Benjamin Zachariah, Potsdam, and Jolita Zabarskaitė, Bonn

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 narrative forms and retellings.

Program

May 23, 2025

11:00h Susan Neiman
Welcome Address

11:10h Jolita Zabarskaitė, Benjamin Zachariah
Introductory Remarks: Bandung’s Reproductivity and the Road from the Third World to the Global South

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

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

16:00h Robert Vitalis
World-Myth-Making After Empire

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

May 24, 2025

11:00h Andrea Benvenuti
Nehru’s Bandung

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

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

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

17:45h Bernd Greiner
Roads Not Taken

Conference brochure (pdf)

The event will be held in English.