Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference

ISBN 10: 0822360519 ISBN 13: 9780822360513

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

While Richard Wright's account of the 1955 Bandung Conference has been key to shaping Afro-Asian historical narratives, Indonesian accounts of Wright and his conference attendance have been largely overlooked. Indonesian Notebook contains myriad documents by Indonesian writers, intellectuals, and reporters, as well as a newly recovered lecture by Wright, previously published only in Indonesian. Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher introduce and contextualize these documents with extensive background information and analysis, showcasing the heterogeneity of postcolonial modernity and underscoring the need to consider non-English language perspectives in transnational cultural exchanges. This collection of primary sources and scholarly histories is a crucial companion volume to Wright'sThe Color Curtain.   

About this title

About the Author:

Brian Russell Roberts is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University and the author of Artistic Ambassadors: Literary and International Representation of the New Negro Era.  Keith Foulcher is Honorary Associate in the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney and the coeditor of Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature.  

Review:

"Indonesian Notebook fills out the broader picture of Wright and the conference. It performs a valuable service ... and should encourage further scholarly digging in locales and languages affected by the conference." (Jason Parker Journal of American History 2017-06-01)

"In U.S. histories, the meanings of the term the Third World is often rendered as stable. Non-American actors, too, sometimes remain only a spectral presence. By insisting that Indonesian intellectuals and Wright co-produced a different kind of Bandung spirit, Indonesian Notebook instead underscores the contingencies of what one historian rightly calls “the complex and uneven geographies of the postcolonial cold war world.” In doing so it can help us begin to reimagine the politics, and the poetics, of the Third World." (Mark Philip Bradley Modern American History 2018-03-01)

"Rigorously researched and beautifully composed." (Taomo Zhou Southeast Asian Studies 2017-12-01)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0822360519
• ISBN 13: 9780822360513
• Binding: Stationery
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Roberts Brian Russell, Foulcher Keith