Afterword: Big History, Little History, Interstitial History: On the Tightrope between Polyvocality and Lingua Franca

Accounts of Richard Wright’s Indonesian travels have relied almost exclusively on European-language sources, English in particular. This privileging of English has distorted and virtually erased scholarly access to Indonesian views of Wright’s travels. Virtually none of the Indonesian-language sources included in this book has figured in the extensive body of scholarship surrounding Wright’s own English-language account of the Bandung Conference, The Color Curtain. Translating and publishing these texts in English means adopting the medium of a historically contingent lingua franca to provide a broad spectrum of readers with access to a mid-twentieth-century Asian-African postcolonial modernity that forms part of a global network of modernisms. As a book that combines primary sources with extensive historical narrative in order to reimagine one of the Bandung Conference’s unquestionably “big” histories, this book makes use of “little” and “interstitial” histories to illuminate the planetary history of multiplicity and difference.