The forthcoming article “An anatomy of worldmaking: Sukarno and anticolonialism from post-Bandung Indonesia” by Say Jye Quah is summarized by the author below.
This article, titled “An anatomy of worldmaking: Sukarno and anticolonialism from post-Bandung Indonesia”, analyzes the anticolonial worldmaking of postcolonial Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, during Guided Democracy (1959-1965). Using worldmaking as a conceptual interface, it offers three interconnected interventions.
First, it attempts a conceptual advance in the uses and understandings of worldmaking, which has conceptually anchored recent scholarship across a range of cognate fields. The influence of the concept may be attributed to how it manages to encompass a wide range of activities within its scope while also forcefully channeling our attention towards ambitious (and urgent) present day imperatives. However, this concept has been appropriated loosely, where worldmaking is increasingly annexed to a diffuse set of referents. There is a danger of conceptual overextension.
This article stages a conceptual advance by pursuing an anatomy of worldmaking. This entails disaggregating worldmaking into its different dimensions, explicating a rich spectrum of activity that operates with distinct accompanying logics. This spectrum is intended to loosely reflect the state of the literature on worldmaking and show how worldmaking connects to a myriad of issues and lines of inquiry. This article offers a typology where the disaggregated dimensions of worldmaking are interconnected, but, nevertheless, each dimension can be taken in abstraction and analytically isolated, and from there approached through distinct modes of study.
This leads to the second intervention, which is to contribute to the scholarly discussion within the history of anticolonial political thought. This article analyzes the anticolonial worldmaking projects of postcolonial Indonesia’s first president Sukarno at the peak of his political influence from 1959 to 1965. This moves towards rectifying regional imbalances within this literature: while scholars have sought to recover anticolonial political leaders as global political thinkers, Southeast Asia’s absence is conspicuous. Sukarno and Indonesia provide a prime example: despite acting as one of the prime architects of the Third World—especially by hosting the Bandung Conference in 1955—Indonesia remains the world’s “biggest invisible thing”, with a vast mismatch between the country’s size and the muted mainstream academic attention.
This rectification of regional imbalances, in turn, provokes reflection on the different pathways of anticolonial praxis: by surfacing a contextually specific relationship between international organizations and decolonization, this article underscores the importance of sensitivity to situated understandings of anticolonialism. Contrary to other anticolonial figures, Sukarno’s worldmaking revolved around a postcolonial vision of global order outside the United Nations, requiring attempts to simultaneously tear down their foundations and establish alternative institutions outside their purview.
These two interventions are grounded upon a third: shifting the lines of inquiry that have preoccupied the English-language scholarship of Sukarno or mid-twentieth century Indonesia more broadly. By inter alia resituating him within the Third World, this works towards bringing Sukarno out of a primarily Area Studies frame and towards wider disciplinary audiences.
The article closes by laying out some contradictions of Sukarno’s anticolonial worldmaking project. Sukarno remains a valuable figure to think with, given that so many of his questions are now ours.
About the Author: Say Jye Quah is a PhD student at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Cambridge. Their research “An anatomy of worldmaking: Sukarno and anticolonialism from post-Bandung Indonesia” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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