Session 6: Politics, Globalisation and Culture

Session 6: Politics, Globalisation and Culture
Chair: Catalina Botez

The Enduring Legacy of Bandung, Non-Alignment and Richard Wright
Rob Burton
Department of English, California State University-Chico, California, USA

Five decades after the 1955 Bandung Conference (the meeting of delegates from 29 Asian and African countries that helped to spawn the Non-Aligned Movement as an alternative to the bi-polar Communist-Capitalist axis in post-World War Two politics), what are its enduring legacies? In particular, how has it helped to shape the politics, economics, and culture of the participating nations as well as those other nations that were not in attendance? The African-American writer, Richard Wright, famously commented: “Bandung was a decisive moment in the consciousness of 65 percent of the human race, and that moment meant: how shall the human race be organized?” (The Color Curtain, 207-208)
Despite Richard Wright’s widely-shared idealism about the conference, it is more realistic to conclude that the trajectory of globalization in the last five decades has been steered not so much by Bandung as its predecessor conference at Bretton Woods (New Hampshire) which helped to establish the economic foundations for contemporary globalization: the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank (later renamed the World Bank), and various mechanisms for encouraging international free trade and increasingly unregulated market economies.
In this paper, I am interested in putting these two conferences—Bretton Woods and Bandung—in productive dialogue with one another. Two questions will be raised initially and then briefly examined: What happens when you implicate “the one-in-the-other” (to adapt Homi Bhabha’s phrase), rather than treat them as discrete conferences with separate agendas? To what extent do the enduring political, economic, and cultural legacies of Bandung inform and shape thinking and practice in a contemporary context so heavily indebted to Bretton Woods?
A set of further questions will then be treated in more detail: If Bhabha’s “doubling” notion is conceded, then is it worthwhile to revive the spirit of Bandung (particularly its emphasis on “non-alignment” and “a third way”) as a narrative and a frame of reference that can continue to serve a useful contemporary purpose? How did Bandung inspire contemporary writers (witnesses to Bandung) such as Richard Wright, Pramoedya Ananta Toer,  and Naguib Mahfouz? How does it continue to inspire a new generation of writers today, such as Arundhati Roy, Nawal el Saadawi, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’O?

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Engaging in Civil Society under Post-Socialism: Images and Forms of Environmental Protest in Slovakia
Davide Torsello
Cultural Anthropology, Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature, Bergamo, Italy

No abstract is presently available

Expressions of Exceptions and Exceptions of Expressions: On Broken Languages as Political Discourse
Tina Rahimy
Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The treatment of refugees is one of the most problematic issues of global politics. Although the political refugee is a minority compared to victims of war and poverty, as a modern concept it plays a crucial role in political discussions. Pro-refugee advocates remind democratic countries of their ethical duty to help political refugees, while the anti-refugee lobby emphasizes the economical and cultural risks of hosting them. Both however are in agreement on one point: refugees are the objects of discussion, hardly subjects able to speak for themselves. Geopolitical discourse is about them. They are not yet participating in this discourse, let alone transforming it.
My goal is to enhance this participation by developing discursive tools, i.e. concepts that fit the interiority of the refugee. In this paper I compare different political theories that elaborate these concepts, taking into account the ambiguous political position of refugees. I refer to Arendt’s “The Human Condition” and “We Refugees”, Agamben’s “Homo Sacer” and “Means without End” and to Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”.
To end the fairy tale of current democracy one must distinguish between becoming of a human and becoming of a citizen or a nation. This human being is no longer defined by fixed identities. Arendt pleas for speech in-between political spaces. Agamben enriches Arendts political speech with the recognition of the excluded bare life. This excluded political speech finds its space by changing the strata of thought, as advocated by Deleuze and Guattari, seeing life as a becoming, a potentiality.
How to speak when speech is broken during flight? Is the broken speech of the migrant only a shortcoming or does it, rather, carry in itself the potentiality to break through the strata of thought?

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The Social Construction of Grievance and its Role in Social Movements: Overseas Filipino Workers Activism and Homeland Filipino Politics
Jae Seung Moon
Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

While studies of political opportunity and framing efforts have received a great amount of attention in recent social movement literature, studies on grievance are largely lacking. Both framing perspective and resource mobilization theory take grievance for granted, assuming that it always exists in aggrieved actors. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the existing perspectives and highlight the importance of grievances, particularly socially constructed grievances in social movement. Specifically, this paper traces embeddedness of constructed grievance in Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). First, I will look at how the discourse of the Philippines ‘national hero’ is perceived by OFWs. By juxtaposing the discourse of national hero in the Philippines and the status of OFWs, who are hailed as ‘modern-day heroes’, this analysis provides a mechanism of the generation of social grievances from constructed discourses. For highlighting the discrepancy between discourse and reality, I will trace OFW life, collecting their thoughts and sentiments from related written materials. Second, I will examine how this constructed grievance empowers them to exert a successful influence on both chambers in the Congress regarding the passage of the Overseas Absentee Voting (OAV) bill in 2003. Through the examination, this paper will argue that perception of relative deprivation from constructed grievances lead OFWs to participate in worldwide lobbying for the passage of the OAV bill.
This paper will make a contribution to studies on identity in social movement literature. In contrast to risk-benefit calculus of the rational model, this paper argues that identity of a social movement group such as constructed grievances can be the driving force for actors to participate the social movements.