Antiblackness in Malaysia, the Bandung Spirit and African–Asian Decolonial Critique in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain

Abstract

In 1955 the African American writer Richard Wright attended the landmark conference of recently liberated Asian and African nations in Bandung, Indonesia. Arguably, the Bandung conference marked the first conscious gathering of non-European peoples in the modern era that attempted to reshape the world-system of nation-states and economic relations. Today the conference has become an idiom for the desires of African–Asian and Global South solidarity, sometimes referred to as the ‘Bandung spirit’. And yet alongside this stated ideal, there are many racialist contradictions between people of African and Asian descent, both at the level of state-to-state relations as well as in everyday social dynamics. In contemporary Malaysia, the cultural discourse that has emerged concerning the presence of African students and immigrants has been steeped in virulent antiblack racism and violence. These deeply absorbed and redeployed antiblack discourses help to situate Malaysia and Malaysians as complicit in reproducing globalised racial hierarchies based on the tacit acceptance of the deep structures of racist thinking and hierarchies as the basis for social organisation. They plainly go against any putative sense of a Bandung spirit. This chapter reassesses Bandung neither to memorialise or destroy it, but rather to situate it within a larger history and trajectory of modernity’s construction of blackness and postcolonial Asian identity formations. It does so by examining Wright’s search for connection with Third World and Asian anticolonial struggles through a critical reading of his report on Bandung, The color curtain, and drawing parallels with the Malaysian internationalist-oriented writer Usman Awang. Wright’s account of the potential and pitfalls of the Bandung moment of African–Asian solidarity can illuminate how the scourge of antiblack racism has become virulent in Malaysia today. The analysis presented here proposes that the apparent tension between the discourses of antiblack racism in Malaysia and the Bandung internationalist imaginary is amenable to a tense but productive cultural critique.