Diplomacy as Theatre:
Staging the Bandung
Conference of 1955

Naoko Shimazu

17 April 2021
4pm—5.30pm (SGT)

To register please email:
natalie@greyprojects.org

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As a significant ‘moment’ in twentieth-century international diplomacy, the rise of post-colonial Afro-Asia at the Bandung Conference of 1955 is replete with symbolic meanings. Naoko Shimazu’s lecture will propose ‘diplomacy as theatre’ as a conceptual approach to understanding the symbolic dimension of international diplomacy and recasting the conference as a theatrical performance, in which actors performed on the stage to audiences. Sukarno, Nehru, Zhou Enlai and Nasser all understood the importance as performers in their role as new international statesmen, representing the esprit de corps of the newly emergent post-colonial world.  In deconstructing the symbolic, Shimazu's lecture makes apparent the role played by Indonesia in defining the underlying script of the diplomatic theatre which unfolded at Bandung.

About the Speaker

Naoko Shimazu is a global historian of Asia, and joined Yale-NUS College after 20 years of teaching at Birkbeck University of London. She has a joint appointment as Professor at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Before she became an academic, she was a merchant banker in the City of London. Her main research work is on the cultural history of diplomacy, focusing on the idea of ‘diplomacy as theatre’ at the Bandung Conference of 1955. Together with Dr Christian Goeschel, she is the Editor of the Oxford Handbook on the Cultural History of Global Diplomacy, c. 1750-2000 (forthcoming 2024). Her major publications include Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia (co-editor, Routledge, 2013), Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Nationalisms in Japan (editor, Routledge, 2006), Japan, Race and Equality: Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (Routledge, 1998). Recently, she co-authored with Regina Hong and Ling Xi Min, Postcard Impressions from Early 20th Century Singapore: Perspective from the Japanese Community (Singapore: National Library Board, 2020).