UC Berkeley

The city of Bandung in West Java, Indonesia became a symbol of the Non-Aligned Movement when it hosted the first Asian-African conference in 1955, known as the Bandung Conference. This study traces the efforts of Indonesian intellectuals and visionaries of the postcolonial world who have been reinventing the city of Bandung, rupturing it from its colonial origin. This research foregrounds class, ethnicity, and race in Bandung’s postcolonial trajectory through urban transformation beginning in 1870 when Dutch colonial sovereignty was declared, and ending before the 1965 anti-communist massacres in early post-Independence Indonesia. I explore three key periods of colonial and post-Independence rules: late Dutch colonialism (1870–1942), Japanese occupation (1942–1945), and the early, post-Independence Indonesia period (1945–1965). This study focuses on three themes as follows: first, the establishment of a colonial city expressive of the elite society initiated by the Netherlands East Indies government, Dutch private planters, and local aristocrats of West Java in the nineteenth century; second, the role of ethnic Chinese Indonesian builders and their family enterprises in shaping the local urban landscape of the early twentieth century; and third, the construction of the social club and theater and subsequent appropriation of the theater, renamed the Independence Building, as a conference venue in 1955, to announce the emergence of Afro-Asian solidarity and expunge elitist colonial legacies from the city center. Through family memoirs, individual and institutional archives and oral history, I argue that social practices of architectural preservation and city planning legitimized a new regime of non-aligned power through built construction and the calculated erasure of unwanted memories embedded in palimpsests of Bandung’s city fabric.