Introducing…Bandung 1955!

Writer & Educator Tamara K. Nopper has started a new blog, Bandung 1955 which is “preoccupied with racial, gender, sexual, economic, and national politics and how power, asymmetry, and social relations inform the global organization of social life, lived experiences, and political appeals.”

The first two blog entries are definitely work reading:

For those of you not familiar with the “Bandung” Conference in 1955, today’s blog entry celled “The Illusion of Afro-Asian Solidarity?: Situating the 1955 Bandung Conference is a good grounding and critique on that historic conference of African and Asian nations/people. Nopper offers this critique:

Indeed, despite today’s tendency to describe the coming together of “people of color” as inherently revolutionary, it does not appear that the US government was convinced that Africans and Asians were steadfastly united in some primordial sense of brotherhood. Rather, research suggests that the White House was more concerned with what they anticipated to be certain Asian countries’ efforts to make participants look to the east and away from the west. In other words, it appears that the White House was not too concerned with a real possibility of solidarity between Africans and Asians. Rather, evidence suggests that the US really feared that certain Asian countries were using the platform of solidarity in order to achieve Asian self-determination. This of course would undermine US and Western interests in controlling the Asian region and its people. Further, the specter of Asian nationalism and regional cooperation was driven by the specter of cooperation between Asia and the USSR. Ostensibly, the US worried that the platform of Afro-Asian solidarity was really a ruse to turn the Black and Asian worlds into what can crudely be labeled “communist dupes” vis-à-vis a strategic discourse of self-determination and anti-colonialism.

The first post, The Trouble With Transgender Politics, is a bold critique of trans politics. It is one that I often hear discussed iprivately, but there is a lot of fear in the community-even among queers, to take this on publicly.

When I have asked friends why we should politically care about transgender politics, I am often told that we should support people’s ability to transition or express oneself as trans–and have political and legal protection for these transitions/expressions as well as financial resources to facilitate medical processes if need be–because this is who the person “really is.” I interpret this defense of trans politics as suggesting that gender (even if not the gender one was assigned) is “real,” and race is a “construction.” As such, transgender people are supposed to get our progressive support for being able to express who they “really are” and to have their bodies and bodily expressions align with the “true” (gendered) person existing inside.

Tags: bandung, tamara nopper, transgender