911吃瓜

Bandung 1955 was a historical marker that broke the ground for third-world internationalism to develop against the logic of cold-war geopolitical monopoly. It preceded the non-aligned movement that expanded Asian-African solidarity to Latin America. 70 years on, where are we today concerning the legacies of Bandung, from decolonization to ‘the five principles of peaceful coexistence’? This seminar brings speakers from different parts of Asia to reflect on the trajectory and its regional and global lessons. Is the ‘Bandung spirit’ alive anymore? What is the ‘third world’ then and the ‘global south’ now? Where might we redefine visions for a tri-continental project in the enduring struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and variants of neoliberal globalization? How can we engage such a project critically and intellectually in a world of multiple crises? 

Symposium Schedule 

10am-10:10am: Opening remarks from Prof John Sidel, Director of SEAC 

10:10am-11:25am: The Bandung legacy: Third World or Global South? 

Chair: Bingchun Meng 

Speakers:  

Kuan-Hsing Chen (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan - "Third World" or "Global South"? 

2025 marks the anniversary of Bandung 70th. In the conjuncture of  global transformations and the current crises of Third World War, the notion of the "Third World" first coined by the French historian Alfred Sauvy on August 14, 1952 L'Observateur) and the "Global South" (the term first used by American political activist Carl Oglesby at the 1969 Commonweal Conference need to be revisited and revised to create new concepts, which have to be carefully debated and theorized, more analytical and explanatory. Only by changing the modern thought of change can it be possible to effectively intervene in the system of the "nation-state" so that we can inherit the spirits of Bandung conference (organized by Afro-Asian leaders including Sukarno, Nehru, Nassir, Zhou Enlai, among others), moving towards a better, more equal and peaceful world to save wretched of the earth (Fanon). 

Noer Rachman (Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia)

Hilmar Farid (Jakarta Institute of Arts, Indonesia) - Bandung: Reviving Worldmaking from the Ground Up 

Seventy years after Bandung, its spirit of decolonization, solidarity, and peaceful coexistence remains vital but must be reimagined for today’s crises. While formal sovereignty was achieved, structural dependency persists, and the Global South risks becoming a descriptive or symbolic label rather than a worldmaking project. We must resist treating Bandung, the Third World, and the Global South merely as figurative ideals and instead reclaim them as material commitments—grounded in the urgent transformation of economies, governance, and social life. Reactivating Bandung means delinking from colonial logics and rebuilding solidarity based on biocultural sovereignty, regenerative economies, and pluriversal governance. Indonesia’s archipelagic reality offers a model: moving from an economy of extraction to one rooted in community-led stewardship of life systems. Bandung’s renewal demands not nostalgia, but bold, situated experiments to construct just and livable futures from the ground up.

11:25am-11:40am: Break 

11:40am-12:55pm: The global history of Bandung 

Chair: Qingfei Yin 

Speakers: 

Su Lin Lewis (University of Bristol) - Bandung and Beyond: Afro-Asian Solidarity in the Era of Decolonisation

John Munro (University of Birmingham) - The Bandung Method: US Anticolonialism Then and Now   

Jesook Song (University of Tonronto) - Third World Women’s Network in the Bandung Era

1-2pm: Break 

2:05-3:35pm: Decolonisation and socialist internationalism 

Chair: Hyun Bang Shin 

Speakers: 

Priyamvada Gopal (University of Cambridge) - Bandung and the Limits of Decolonisation

Ashwani Sharma (Independent scholar) - Tragic Utopias: 1970s revolutionary struggles, Third cinema, Bandung memories

The presentation examines 1970s revolutionary movements in relation to the political legacies of Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World internationalism through ideas of Third Cinema, specially the films of Naeem Mohaiemen. In particular how the films present a tragic vision of the revolutionary 1970s, while still offering some hope for the future though remembering the militant struggles and their failures for international socialism in the sprit of Bandung. There will be a screening of a short film by Mohaiemen ''Abu Ammar is Coming" (2016) . 

Ling Zhang (State University of New York, US) - Long Live the Bandung Spirit (1965): Chinese Newsreels and the Asia-African Conferences 

Amid contemporary wars and turmoil, this paper revisits the Chinese documentary Long Live the Bandung Spirit (1965, 34 min, produced by the Central Studio of Newsreel Production), which commemorates the 10th anniversary of the 1955 Bandung Conference. This historic gathering marked a moment when newly independent Asian and African nations asserted their sovereignty, dignity, and solidarity, free from Western colonial dominance. During the “Cold War,” Asian nations endured “hot wars,” such as the Korean War (1950-53) and American imperialist war in Vietnam, framing the significance of the Asian-African Conferences. In 1950s and 1960s China, short documentaries like Long Live the Bandung Spirit served as vital media for knowledge production in the absence of television news. Shown in theaters before feature films, these works conveyed geo-social realities and anti-colonial solidarity, inspiring internationalist empathy. Through eloquent voice-over narration, they acted as audio-visual political essays, fostering shared consciousness among Chinese audiences and formerly colonized peoples. While the 1965 documentary radiates optimism for peaceful coexistence and unity in difference, its vision was tragically undermined by Indonesia’s anti-communist coup and brutal massacres several months later. This paper explores how revisiting such moments and media events can inform our pursuit of a just and humane global future. 

Zhiguang Yin (Fudan University, China) - Theorising the future: Bandung Spirit and the Making of a non-Hegemonic World Order 

3:35-4pm: Closing plenary session 

This event is part of the Inter-Asia Seminar Series. It was generously funded by the SEAC Seminar Series and Networking Grant.

Meet our speakers and chairs:

Bingchun Meng is Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also co-directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. Professor Meng is currently the Director of 911吃瓜PhD Academy and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP). Her research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely in these topic areas on leading academic journals. From 2020 to 2021, she served as a Senior Fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation. Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation was published by Palgrave in early 2018. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China.

Kuan-Hsing Chen is Professor Emeritus of Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. He is the Co-executive Editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the Editor of Renjian Thought, and founder of Bandung School (Taipei). He is the author of Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization (2010) and Chen Yingzhen and the Third World (2025).

Hilmar Farid is a historian and cultural activist based in Indonesia. Since the 1990s, he has been actively involved in civil society movements, advocating for democratic reform, cultural rights, and historical justice. From 2016 to 2024, he served as Director-General of Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia. He is currently a faculty member at the Graduate School of the Jakarta Institute of the Arts, where he continues to engage in research and teaching on history, culture, and social transformation.

Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building projects in Asia. Her first book  (Cambridge University Press, 2024) weaves together international, national, and transnational-local histories to present a new approach to the highly volatile Sino-Vietnamese relations, centering on the two modernising revolutionary powers' competitive and collaborative state building on the borderlands and local responses to it.

Su Lin Lewis is Professor of Global and Asian History at the University of Bristol specialising in cities, gender, decolonisation, and transnational activism in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century. She co-led the AHRC-funded project, which produced a range of scholarship material as well as data visualisation, website, and a lively blog.  She is the author of the award-winning Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 (Cambridge 2016), co-editor (with Carolien Stolte) of The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden, 2022), and co-editor (with Nana Osei-Opare) of Socialism, Internationalism, and Development: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonisation(forthcoming with Bloomsbury, 2024). She is currently working on a book on socialist internationalism in decolonising Asia. 

John Munro is a lecturer in history at the University of Birmingham. He is author of , editor with Kirrily Freeman of and and, with Radhika Natarajan, author of the Public Books . 

Jesook Song is the Chair and Professor of Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is a historical anthropologist with interests in decolonial knowledge production, housing, finance, welfare, labor, gender, and sexuality. Her first book, South Koreans in the Debt Crisis (Duke UP, 2009) deals with homelessness and youth unemployment during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s to early millennium. Her second book Living On Their Own (SUNY Press, 2014) is about rental housing and informal financial markets through single women’s struggle in South Korea. She has also published an edited volume, two co-edited volumes and two special issues, and numerous articles in journals and edited volume. 

Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and the Head of the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Professor Shin is an internationally recognised scholar in urban studies whose research has profoundly influenced critical urban theory and practice, particularly in non-Western contexts. By challenging conventional perspectives and entrenched paradigms, he has contributed to reshaping the understanding of contemporary urban transformation, foregrounding the socio-political dynamics of cities in rapidly developing world regions and highlighting the intersections of state power, global capital, and urban inequality. 

Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Faculty of English Cambridge, and author of three books, most recently Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent. Currently on a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship working on decolonisation.

Ashwani Sharma is an independent cultural theorist. He was formerly a Senior Lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is coeditor of the online journal darkmatter, and a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths. He is an adviser to Soundings and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. His research and writing is in racial capitalism, blackness and cultural studies; diasporic and postcolonial urban, visual and music cultures; communication and globalisation; the university and radical education; and open access publishing. He is the coeditor of Dis-orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the Asian Music (Zed). He is a published poet and a DJ. 

Ling Zhang is associate professor of cinema studies at the State University of New York, Purchase College, and a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University (2024–25). She holds a PhD in cinema and media studies from the University of Chicago and an MA in film studies from the Beijing Film Academy. Her current book projects include “Unruly Sounds: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Acoustic Culture, 1929–1949” and “Sounding Wayward Journeys: Traveling Film and Media in China and the World, 1949–1989.” She is also coeditor of The Politics of the Soundtrack and Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (2025). Her research on film sound and politics, Chinese-language cinema, gender studies, digital media, and the cultural Cold War has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, the Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Comparative Cinema, and Asian Cinema, among others.  

Zhiguang Yin is a Professor in international politics at the Fudan University. His research interest lies mainly in the area of Chinese modern intellectual and legal history, Marxist political economy, imperial history, and the global south modernisation. His research and teaching centre on a theoretical interests in understanding the making of the modern world order through the dynamic tension between domination and resistance. He is currently the principal investigator of a 5-year project funded by The National Social Science Fund of China - Major Project Grant. The project looks into the issue of development in the Global South from a Marxist political economic perspective.