Revisiting the Bandung Conference: berbeda sejak dalam pikiran

The 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference seems to be a timely moment to re-evaluate how we frame the Bandung Conference. Glorified as the momentous event of forging Asian-African solidarity to fight colonialism and imperialism, scholars and intellectuals oftentimes look upon the Conference for an alternative framework on solidarity. Although not beyond criticism, the Bandung Spirit remains a sought-after awareness that connects the common historical experience of colonialism and pushes forward the process of decolonization. Much needed, however, is the contextualization of Bandung Conference to Indonesia's state of politics and social affairs. It is imperative that we begin to see the Bandung Conference not as a solitary event in the historiography of Indonesia, but as an event within the trajectory of the newly emerging state. In that sense, we have to reframe the Bandung Conference as dependent upon other events within both the chronological and sporadic history that characterizes the post-independence struggle in Indonesia.     

Reading Chen Yingzhen: why and how

ABSTRACT

Since 2009, there has been a renewed trend in Taiwan's intellectual circles to explore Chen Yingzhen. In this lies a strong and unprecedented inclination to explore in Chen Yingzhen's literary works the enormous resources he provides as a thinker. As one of the researchers who has undertaken such an approach, I intend to address three issues in this article: first, his relation with people of my generation and the reason to re-read him at this moment; second, how I, as an amateur in terms of literary works or literary criticism, read literary texts. I address this issue in terms of methodology and theory, and propose a reading method consisting of a triple intersecting process among the text, the author and the history. Thirdly, and perhaps the most importantly, I address the issue of “why do we have to read Chen Yingzhen now” from three levels: history, thinking and literature in order to explore the particular situation his literary works have in contemporary literature, as well as its intellectual meaning in the contemporary world.     

Reclaiming America: the quest for home in Shawn Wong’s Homebase

ABSTRACT

With its dynamic narrative, Shawn Wong's Homebase recounts the story of four generations of a Chinese family searching for a homebase on the land of the United States. Personal experiences, family chronicles, and Chinese American history are portrayed through various forms, including short stories, correspondences, student essays, memories, and dreams. A major theme of the novel is geographically and spiritually “reclaiming America,” or attempts by Chinese Americans to make the United States their “real” home. The protagonist's way to reclaim America involves revisiting landmarks and other places in the United States where his father and grandfather had traveled, through which he tries to discover the meaning of his own life in the United States and thereby to find his personal identity and home in this country. In drawing the topography of Chinese American history, Shawn Wong not only inscribed Chinese American presence on those places where the protagonist's forefathers had lived and worked, but also used legends to implant their heritage into those soils. Shawn Wong hopes that through his writing he can build for Chinese Americans a history, a cultural foundation with myths and legends of their own. Only when a people's myths spread over the land they inhabit can the land truly be considered theirs. The Chinese American identity shaped in Homebase is heroism, rooted in the ethnic identity of the male Chinese American in the American West, and this is the “home” that the protagonist as well as many other Chinese Americans ever quest for.     

Rethinking the Rural Idyll

ABSTRACT

This article traces the profound social repercussions that resulted from the mass enlistment of British office workers into the armed forces during the First World War. Drawing heavily upon fictionalized autobiographies of the period, my study examines the various stages of the clerk's experience of the conflict and argues that the confidence gained during warfare by surviving office workers fundamentally shaped a more democratic postwar society. This change is evidenced, I argue, in the profile of the fictional clerk that emerges in British literature after 1918.     

Remembering the atrocities of their ancestral lands: reading Korean American “comfort women” novels in Japan

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the significance of reading two Korean American novels which address the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery (known as the “comfort women” system) in the context of Japan: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. I will explore how this act can facilitate the understanding of the militarized sexual violence in the present social and discursive context of Japan, where the issue suffers from a strong backlash. Lee’s A Gesture Life with its critique of multiple militarized imperialisms challenges the Japanese revisionists’ effort to deny the egregious wrongs of Japan’s military sexual slavery; it also responds to popular criticism in Japan that Korean/Americans disregard the practices of Western imperial and military violence and only condemn Japanese war crimes. The paper in turn also reads Keller’s Comfort Woman through the frame of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a Japanese Canadian novel which remembers the internment and U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. My aim here is to examine both the risks and possibilities which this reading can generate. While it can help us see the comparable acts of remembering war sufferings from the standpoint of diasporas, it can also erase the non-equivalence between the two histories.     

The Earthly Landscape of the Heavenly City: A New Framework for the Examination of the Urban Development of Frankish Jerusalem

This article introduces a new methodological framework for the examination of Frankish Jerusalem's urban development, based on a database encompassing documents relating to Jerusalem from the first half of the twelfth century. The deconstruction of documents according to their primary elements provides a new framework for their use in the study of the socio-economic mechanisms that propelled the transformation of Jerusalem's cityscape, hitherto commonly perceived as restricted to monumental construction. This supplements the panoramic view of the city, obtained from contemporary narrative sources and archaeological evidence, with an analytical depiction of the evolving urban environment. Such an analytical approach unveils previously undetected facets of Jerusalem's urban development, such as the early emergence and spatial distribution of residential areas, crystallisation of notions of property ownership and shifting patterns of economic conduct. It sheds new light on the periodisation and scope of urban change in Jerusalem and its correlation to wider socio-economic processes.     

The religious,the plural,the secular and the modern: a brief critical survey on Islam in Malaysia

Abstract

The embedization of Islam in Malaysia has gone through a long and complex process that involved an interaction with three major world civilizations (Indian, Chinese and European) and two colonial systems (Dutch and British) during which many aspects of its practices were reconfigured. This paper provides a brief critical survey of the evolution of the said embedization process during which Islam and the Muslims in Malaysia were moulded by a series of sociological realities, namely plural society, secularism and modernity. This has resulted, we argue, in the creation of 'moderate' Islam in Malaysia, one that is quite different from the fundamentalist image of Islam profiled in the contemporary worldwide discourse on global Islam     

Increase in the preference for civic over ethnic nationalism among Poles: The impact of representations of a multiethnic past on the perceived inclusiveness of the nation

While the importance of a nation’s history for its current national issues is well established, whether and how that history may be leveraged to promote inclusive and amicable intergroup relationships is less clear. We offer answers to these questions by showing that the referencing of a multiethnic past of a nation is a form of indirect intergroup contact that increases the perceived inclusiveness of the current nation. Firstly, in a nationally representative sample of Poles, we demonstrate that after referring to Poland’s multiethnic history before and during World War II, respondents expressed a greater preference for civic rather than ethnic nationalism. In other words, they expressed more inclusive understanding of their national identity. Secondly, in the follow-up experiment, we further explore this effect by replicating it in one of the targeted samples. Overall, our findings demonstrate how nations may benefit from utilising some parts of their history to promote inclusiveness.     

“To Reach the Lands of Freedom”: Petitions of Polish Displaced Persons to American Poles,Moral Screening and the Role of Diaspora in Refugee Resettlement

ABSTRACT

In 1949, in the wake of the USA’s Displaced Persons Act of 1948, the American Committee for the Resettlement of Polish Displaced Persons received thousands of letters from refugees of peasant and worker background residing in camps in Germany and Austria. These potential immigrants appealed to the Polish diaspora for help with securing assurances of accommodation and work which would enable them to resettle in the USA. This paper investigates the discursive strategies of the authors and the wider meanings of their emigration endeavour. Firstly, it demonstrates that non-elite Displaced Persons (DPs) adopted the language of martyrology, patriotism, anti-Communism and freedom to maximise their chances of emigration. These DPs did not evoke the language of rights as they appealed to the traditional network of support, based on benevolence and familiarity. Secondly, it argues that the American Poles and Polish social elites played a crucial role in resettlement of the DPs, providing an additional layer of screening, here called ‘the moral screening’. It is an example of how ethnic and cultural communities mediated the resettlement procedures supervised by international humanitarian organisations. Using a ‘history from below’ approach, this article argues that during this episode of migration, political and economic ideological underpinnings intertwined.     

The influence of social support on the wellbeing of immigrants residing in Italy: Sources and functions as predictive factors for life satisfaction levels,sense of community and resilience

Moving from one country to another involves not only separation from the country of origin, but also the tiring process of integration into a new physical, institutional, and sociocultural context, which may expose migrants to acculturation stress. The loss of former support networks, or at the very least their transformation, presents immigrants with the need to rebuild their social support systems in the host country, involving an active search for support. Therefore, the aim of study is to analyze the structure of informal social support and its capacity to predict immigrants’ sense of community, resilience, and satisfaction with life. The results confirm that social support predicts satisfaction with life, sense of community, and resilience. Our findings highlight the way sources and frequency of support, and the satisfaction with which they are associated, have different degrees of predictive value on the dependent variables under investigation. In this study, it can be concluded that social support is an important factor in the well-being of migrants and their integration into the host community. The results have an important practical value in promoting interventions that improve immigrants’ support networks and, consequently, increase their satisfaction with life, sense of community, and resilience.