Postcolonial Futures, Archival Pasts: Bandung as Cold War Disruption

Abstract This review essay looks at Wildan Sena Utama's Vision for the Future: An Intellectual History of the 1955 Bandung Conference both as an archival reconstruction and as a national historiography. Although the book includes some valuable materials from Indonesian sources, it is shaped by a genealogical logic that attempts to stabilize Bandung within a coherent diplomatic tradition. This essay works against that framing, interpreting the conference as an unsettled and open-ended field. It emphasizes the improvisational and contradictory aspects of Bandung and focuses on the print and cultural infrastructures that sustained solidarities beyond the state. Through Foucault, Barthes, and Benjamin, the review positions Bandung not as a telos of diplomatic reasoning but as a proposition alive with disruption and deferral. It contends that any political retrieval of Bandung's political life must remain attuned to the archival gaps, aesthetic fragments, and imaginings that defy genealogical closure.