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Conferencing

Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Conferences are central to the history of internationalism.1 They enable representatives of countries, organizations, and movements to meet, discuss ideas, debate approaches, and determine a collective purpose: to come together as global publics. Much like the NGOs examined by Sarah Bellows-Blakeley elsewhere in this AHR History Lab forum, international conferences are characterized by structural processes of inclusion and exclusion; one only has to look at the difficulties faced by scholars from the Global South in obtaining visas to attend conferences in the Global North. And like NGOs, conferences, too, have a long and tainted association with empire.2 They have served to entrench imperial power, from the Berlin Conference of 1884, which carved up the African continent for European colonizers, to the Paris Peace Conference, which instituted racial paternalism in doctrines of imperial trusteeship.3 If global publics, as Huber and Osterhammel argue, come in two major forms—“associations” and “audiences”—decolonizing conferences mobilized both at once, serving as a physical meeting point for transnational activists while attracting new global audiences to their cause. They challenged an internationalist order shaped by colonialism and its legacies.4 As such, to borrow from Michael Warner, they were both publics and counterpublics.5 They drew strength from the visibility of Eurocentric global publics while creating new publics that centered Asia and Africa. The first Pan-African Congress, in 1919, occurred alongside the Paris Peace Conference, from which many Africans and African Americans had been excluded. It enabled participants to forge new regional solidarities to challenge racial discrimination and campaign for political rights. The All-Asian Women’s Conference, held in Lahore in 1933, challenged Western women’s movements’ presumption to speak for all women and instead promoted solidarity among women across Asia (Fig. 10). Pan-African and Asian alignments gave way to transcontinental solidarities at the 1927 League Against Imperialism (LAI) Congress in Brussels, which brought together anticolonial nationalists, socialists, and communists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The league drew on the organizational power and networks of the Communist International, bringing together communist-affiliated groups with wider networks of socialists and anticolonial nationalist student networks based in Europe. It competed with other publics, like the Labour and Socialist International, which viewed the league as a threat to the European socialist movement and worked to discredit the organization.6 Attendees of the All-Asian Women’s Conference in Lahore. All-Asian Women’s Conference Report 1930, Lahore (Bombay, 1930). With the achievement of independence, anticolonial activists—some of whom, like Nehru, had attended the LAI Congress—became political leaders overnight. While he was never there, Sukarno’s linking of the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung to the LAI entrenched the connection between postcolonial leader and activist as well as between state and public. This was true, too, of the staging of the conference itself, where charismatic statesmen including Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou Enlai marched alongside the public on the streets of Bandung.7 At the opening of the Bandung Conference, Sukarno spoke of his emotion at seeing a room of Asian and African leaders brought together through a history of struggle and sacrifice. Both before and after the Bandung Conference, Pan-Asian, Pan-African, and Afro-Asian conferences brought together nonstate actors (including students, women, writers, and peace activists), some in conjunction with the state.8 Despite Nasser’s centrality to the Asian-African People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo, the conference nonetheless styled itself in opposition to the Bandung Conference, as a “people’s conference” organized and attended not by diplomats and state leaders but by activists, workers, and people from all walks of life.9 The 1966 Tricontinental Conference, convened by Fidel Castro and held in Havana, drew on the momentum of these Afro-Asian gatherings, bringing together leftist internationalists from all three continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.10 Vijay Prashad has argued that the Third World was “not a place, but a project,” tracking its early rise through key conferences and cities that drew together the optimism of newly independent nations.11 A key component of this “project” was the creation of a public across what would, much later, come to be known as the Global South. These conferences brought forth new publics through their very naming, by organizers, by delegates, and by the audiences they addressed.12 Their success relied on a transcontinental infrastructure of communication that made global publics possible, even as their organizers sought to radically transform it, creating new lines of communication that subverted the links between metropole and colony.13 The All-Asian Women’s Conference was publicized through advertisements in the Asian press; these recognized that Asian women had been tied more closely to imperial metropoles than their Asian “sisters,” and required a forum in which they could learn of each other’s movements.14 The Bandung Conference attracted not only Asians and Africans but also African Americans. African American journalists, such as Ethel Payne, were assigned to cover the conference because it was advertised as the first gathering for “the darker people of the world”; Richard Wright, whose Colour Curtain forms one of the key—if problematic—accounts of the conference, famously read about the conference in a newspaper in a Paris café.15 What made conferences such a unique form of “public-making” at a global level was their ability to bring strangers from disparate parts of the world together to meet for the first time, to see each other, to bow, to speak, to whisper, to touch, to embrace, and to share meals, all modes of interpersonal communication that enforced trust, solidarity, and created affective international communities.16 Reflecting on the conference, the British journalist Alex Josey noted, “the physical contacts the leaders of the 29 nations made at Bandung, and the secret talks they had, are a very considerable part of [its] success.” At the same time, conflicts and disagreements were rife, and rifts emerged. At the Bandung Conference, delegations directly went against Nehru’s wishes by insisting on giving opening remarks, saying that “they had not come thousands of miles just to sit still or applaud politely”; Nehru, meanwhile, “sat through speeches with ill-concealed irritation” as speakers took up positions between aligned and nonaligned.17 By contrast, Chou En-Lai’s ability to smoothly bridge these concerns allowed him to cultivate China’s role as a “big brother” to smaller nations. At other conferences, such as the 1958 Conference of Asian-African Women in Colombo (known as the “Women’s Bandung”), the Chinese delegation walked out over the presence of UN and international observers, shocking delegations that were more closely aligned to the West. Despite such rifts, both informal and official conversations and debates gave delegates an intimate feel for the shared grievances, challenges, and potential of new and old nations across continents and oceans. So too did the journeys that delegates took to get to conferences, enabling them to mentally stitch together continents. The writers who attended the 1958 Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent wrote of their layover experiences, where they witnessed the extremes of wealth and poverty that characterized Asian and African ports.18 For participants and their audiences, abstract areas of the imagination became known, felt, and experienced well before the conferences in question and afterward. The ability to meet and converse required either a shared language or, if the resources were available, simultaneous translation, as in the Bandung Conference or the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference. The latter conference was supported by the Soviet Union and its vast translation infrastructure, which Nile Green has referred to elsewhere in this Lab.19 In former British colonies—such as India, Burma, and Ghana—the default choice was often English. The Asian Socialist Conference was conducted largely in English, giving the Indians and Burmese an advantage.20 At the same time, Indonesian elites began cultivating English as an international language in place of Dutch, the language of its colonizer; Sukarno delivered his opening speech in English with the help of his British and Australian speechwriters. Yet such conferences also recognized the problems inherent in finding a common language for the postcolonial world. The 1947 Asian Relations Conference discussed the challenges of finding a common language; delegates briefly discussed Esperanto but generally agreed that it was pragmatic to use English—despite its status as a colonial and elite language—with a view to adopting a common Asian language in the future.21 These events were part of a long lineage of conferencing that dated back to the nineteenth century.22 Conferences created specific modes of address, including speeches, committee reports, and discussion forums. They even included informal conversations, structured by breaks, mealtimes, receptions, and evening entertainment. While photographers captured moments of camaraderie among male leaders of the Global South for the world to witness (Fig. 11), most other conferences—particularly women’s conferences—were only recorded in reports, with snatches of memories gathered in interview transcripts, autobiographies, and photographs buried in private archives. Across the spectrum, women’s experiences and their labor as organizers, greeters, and secretaries at these conferences were barely visible at all.23 Nehru and Sukarno at the 1961 Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade. AGB Photo Library. Publications both preceded and succeeded the actual conferences, addressing an audience of readers across the Afro-Asian and Tricontinental world. The report on the Bandung Conference included a “Who’s Who” guide of biographies and photographs of the participating delegates, establishing the core “public”—the associational group—of the conference, while also introducing them as figures of importance to delegates and a wider global audience. The event was serialized through the African-Asian Conference Bulletin, which gave the background context to the conference, contained play-by-play coverage, and provided a follow-up issue with final speeches and reports. Similar bulletins followed the 1958 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana. Many of these conferences gave rise to organizations: the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation continues to this day. But the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association fractured due to the political cleavages that grew deeper across the international Left through the 1960s, exacerbated by the Sino-Soviet Split and the Cold War.24 Afro-Asian conferences, like the interwar conferences that had preceded them, thus created a new internationalist public across the Third World, but also consciously staged an anti-imperial counterpublic. Organizers and participants pitched themselves, in opposition to their former colonial masters, as makers of a new world order, but they were also highly aware of the subordinate status they had inherited.25 This was encapsulated by the discourses of development that underlay such conferences.26 In the meeting rooms of the Art Deco Merdeka building in Bandung, formerly a dance hall for Dutch plantation owners and wealthy Western businessmen, Asian and African officials deplored colonial legacies and economic inequality and recognized that they needed to “catch up” with the West in terms of development; as Nehru argued, they would have to do in ten years what Europe had done in a hundred.27 At the same time, they also challenged the powerful geopolitical camps of the Cold War, styling the “Third World” as a source of peace in a world increasingly ripped apart by ideological conflict. Though conference attendees were aligned to various camps during the Cold War, the Bandung Conference is often seen as the beginning of the Non-Aligned Movement, which, from its own inaugural conference in Belgrade in 1961 through to multiple summits to this day, positioned the Third World as a source of power, solidarity, and alternative world-making on the international stage.28 Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans who attended these conferences would go on to play an important role within what might, despite its limits, be the closest institutional manifestation of the “global public”: the United Nations and associated arenas.29 Interwar Pan-American conferences nurtured Latin American technocrats and women who would go on to transform the terms of international development at the United Nations with their Asian and African counterparts.30 Pan-American, Pan-Asian, Pan-African, Afro-Asian, Tricontinental, and Non-Aligned conferences provided a staging ground to test out new ideas, where Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans could confidently speak for national and regional constituencies on a wider international stage. They used these broader international forums to make claims on behalf of the wider South and to argue on the basis of solidarity forged in conferences across the tricontinental world. The Indonesian intellectual Soedjatmoko, who attended the Asian Relations Conference, the Asian Socialist Conference, and the Bandung Conference, would go on to the UN to form working relationships with other Asian, African, and Latin American diplomats, speaking and writing prolifically and advising on the challenges of Third World development. He later became rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo. From the mid-1960s, across what was once optimistically called “the Third World,” questions of development triggered a drive for equity on a global scale—for a “new international economic order” that would end the dependency of developing countries on the Global North. This body, too, was forged at UN conferences on trade and development and signaled the advent of the Global South as a counterpublic that sought to radically reframe international structures of trade, aid, and development.31 Third World women’s movements also converged in a series of UN-sponsored conferences from 1975 to 1985 in Mexico, Copenhagen, and Nairobi that put Third World women at the center of economic development. From the 1980s, NGOs, too, employed the conference in locales across the South to address issues of relevance, from maternal mortality to access to water, and from illegal logging to human rights. Decolonizing conferences were global publics par excellence, but they were also counterpublics that challenged the centers of power in the Global North. They began as forces of opposition but became ways of claiming, staking, and molding a global public that was more inclusive, more just, and more equal. They spoke to the ways in which publics and counterpublics could be forces of opposition but also forces of dialectical transformation. Today, these early conferences, particularly the Bandung Conference, have taken on a life of their own, as the era of Afro-Asian solidarity has been eroded, recovered, and reframed in new contexts. China has appealed to the historical legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity to chart what some see as a new imperialism across the South. At the same time, conferences continue to be a place and a practice for activists across the Global South to assert themselves as both public and counterpublic, and as a site of necessary solidarity, pragmatic change, and radical vision. Su Lin Lewis is an associate professor of modern global and Southeast Asian history at Bristol University. She is the author of Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940 (Cambridge 2016) and co-leads the Afro-Asian Networks Project with Carolien Stolte. Her current book is on socialist internationalism in decolonizing Southeast Asia.
DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhae173
Author: Su Lin Lewis
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $4,851
OpenAlex ID: W4399657011
FWCI: 2.864
Cites: 19
Cited by: 4
Related to: 10