Canadian Communication Association Annual Keynote
The Bandung Conference held in 1955 in Indonesia attended by representatives of 29 African and Asian national leaders launched the “Third World” as an aspirational political project, and yet is largely unknown to students of Communication. Yet, the vision of a new transnational “information order” that would emerge in the UN in the following decades can be reimagined as an attempt to contest what W.E.B. Dubois would call the “global color line.” This would be premised on reversing the violence of colonial media infrastructures designed to extract land and labor, surveil, discipline and humiliate colonized subjects. How was this reversal and redress imagined and carried out, even for a short moment in history? This presentation reckons with the complex legacy of Bandung and subsequent internationalist efforts by anti-colonial nationalists, socialists, black liberation activists and feminists to liberate colonial communications and information infrastructures with an anti-racist (racialist in the language of the era) agenda and praxis.
This talk is organized in collaboration with the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada.
