Rewriting Solidarities in Juxtaposition

Abstract

This essay proposes nonsynchronous juxtaposition as a narrative device to critically engage with the complex historical legacies of the Bandung Conference 1955 and to reclaim the anticolonial poetic of the Bandung Spirit’s transnational solidarity with a classed and gendered perspective of migrant workers’ contemporary struggles. It argues that juxtaposition forges “Bandung chronopolitics”, a postcolonial politics of time that invokes affective entanglements of historical memories and present anticolonial transnational struggles. To demonstrate the creative and dialogical potential of rewriting solidarities in juxtaposition, this essay performs a close reading that puts side by side two poems titled “Kepada Sahabat Asia Afrika” (To Afro-Asian Friends, 1961) by Sugiarti Siswadi and “Seusai Badai Berpeluk Puisi” (After the Hurricane Embraced a Poem, 2009) by Mega Vristian. This essay summarily positions the poetic of juxtaposition and Bandung chronopolitics as a discursive strategy to avoid unchecked glorification of Bandung legacies and to repurpose the Bandung Spirit as a political imagination that brings historical depth to the works of Third World solidarity from below against the highly coordinated global-imperial capitalism.