The Bandung Spirit: Reflections on Afro-Asian Solidarity

From Aug. 5 to Aug. 8, Columbia Global Centers | Beijing hosted a four-day symposium and film screenings, The Bandung Spirit: Reflections on Afro-Asian Solidarity, to revisit the lost legacy of Bandung and reflect on the future of our globalized world. 

Named after the Indonesian city which hosted the 1955 Congress of Afro-Asian Nations, the Bandung spirit embodies forms of internationalism and the desire for world peace that take as their starting point the life worlds of those peoples and societies forcibly placed on the margins of the dominant world economic and political system.

This capstone symposium and the film screenings in Beijing are part of a multi-year initiative of collaborative research funded by the Center for the Study of Social Difference and organized by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and Columbia Global Centers | Beijing.

The four-day program attracted more than 270 attendees and more than 250,000 people watched the events live through the Beijing Center’s livestream channel.

On August 5, a film screening and discussion on The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, 121 mins) was hosted at the Center. LI Tuo, Adjunct Research Associate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, led the discussion.

On August 6, a public lecture, titled "South-South Translation Before Bandung: China and Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s", was hosted. Professor Michael Gibbs Hill, Associate Professor and Director of Chinese Studies at William and Mary, was invited to share his research. The Paper also covered the event. Link can be found here.

On August 7, a film screening and discussion on Nostalgia for the Light (dir. Patricio Guzmán, 2010, 90 mins) was hosted at the Center. Professor QIAN Ying, Assistant Professor at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, and Dr. WEI Ran, Research Fellow at Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, led the discussion.

On August 8, the Center hosted a one-day symposium on the Bandung Spirit: Reflections on Afro-Asian Solidarity followed by a film screening on Hyenas (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1992, 113 mins). Panelists included Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University), Mamadou Diouf (Columbia University), Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University), Lydia H. Liu (Columbia University), LI Tuo (Columbia University), QIAN Ying (Columbia University), WANG Hui (Tsinghua University), YIN Zhiguang (University of Exeter), WEI Ran (CASS), XIONG Ying (CASS), and LIANG Zhan (CASS).