Friday, January 4, 2013: 3:10 PM
Balcony K (New Orleans Marriott)
Su Lin Lewis, University of California, Berkeley
The emergence of Southeast Asia as a Cold War battleground provided new sources of patronage for newly independent nations in the region. The Soviet Union, America, and China used ‘soft-power’ strategies to influence not only new political leaders, but also Southeast Asian activists and intellectuals. This paper maps out some of this activity, while examining the ways in which Southeast Asians took advantage of the new atmosphere of competition, which led to an opening up of opportunities to travel, to meet each other, and share ideas. It focuses, in particular, on Burma and Indonesia as sites of cultural patronage and civil society engagement. Dance troupes and artists participated in cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union and America, while poets and writers attended peace conferences in Beijing. Burmese students scuttled between the Soviet and American embassies collecting colorful propaganda magazines and learned film-making techniques. Women’s groups and trade unions in both countries were courted by both Soviet and American networks of left-wing activists.
Indonesia and Burma were also sites where emerging networks of activists and literati converged. In 1955, the same year of the Bandung conference, a Congress for Asian Cultural Freedom, supported by the Ford Foundation, was held in Rangoon, bringing together intellectuals from all over the region to share perspectives on the era’s opportunities, including the Indonesian journalists Mochtar Lubis and Rosihan Anwar. How did experiences of engagement with other left-wing activists and intellectuals - from the region as well as elsewhere - influence the ways these groups began to speak about the nation, each other, and their place in the world? Against a backdrop of competing Cold War patronage, this paper explores the cosmopolitan experiences provided by dynamic new forums for inter-cultural exchange, and the way in which activists and intellectuals positioned themselves, and their nations, within them.
