Bà Bình in La Plaza de la Revolución: anticolonial connectivity, gendered archives, and ngoại giao nhân dân

Abstract

ABSTRACT My essay examines the layered connections among anticolonial struggles. I confront the difficulty of tracing these connections as I excavate the global dimensions of bà Nguyễn Thị Bình’s political work. As a Vietnamese revolutionary diplomat, she built transcontinental relations and friendships with people from other nations, liberation movements, and different walks of life. Yet the international relations that she actively constructed are rendered obscure not only by the Eurocentrism of disciplinary knowledge but also by gendered erasure and restricted framings of her diplomatic work. I look into sources from the margins to trace bà Nguyễn Thị Bình’s cosmopolitan engagement in ngoại giao nhân dân (people’s diplomacy). This clues us into the political, material, and affective bonds among colonized peoples that sustain their struggles. It is crucial to shift our lens of research and protocols of knowledge to better attend to the submerged: the globality of anticolonial women, the underground connections that may be elusive in formal archives, the crossings and gatherings of those fighting for a decolonized world. This is not simply a matter of bringing the submerged into visibility, but learning from the submerged to re-conceptualize the range and depths of what constitutes global relations, past and present.