Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula. Learn more about Pranay at his website, and be sure to subscribe to his Substack newsletter, culture shock.

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Through historical analysis, interviews with expert guests, and deep dives into classic works of anticolonial theory, Return to Bandung seeks to make the case for why anti-imperialist politics are as important in our current moment as ever before.

The show takes its name from the Bandung Conference of 1955, which kickstarted the Third Worldist movement and inaugurated a radical new era of international anticolonial solidarity. In his opening address to the conference, Indonesian President Sukarno told the delegates:

We are often told “Colonialism is dead.” Let us not be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead . . . Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.

It’s been nearly 70 years since Bandung, but those words still ring true. Far from the ‘postcolonial’ world that we are constantly being told we live in, the truth is that the moment we find ourselves in now is a fundamentally colonial one. It’s a moment of deepening crises and heightening contradictions, in which new forms of imperialist violence continue to facilitate the coercive extraction of incredible amounts of wealth, value and resources from the exploited periphery—the vast majority of the world’s population—by the entrenched powers of the imperial core. And above all else, its a moment that demands new forms of internationalist solidarity and anticolonial resistance.

• Read the full blog post on culture shock

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What is culture shock?

My name is Pranay Somayajula, culture shock is my blog/newsletter/wannabe magazine. A bit about me: I’m an Indian-American writer, researcher, and cultural critic, currently based in Minneapolis, MN. Here, you can find my thoughts, observations, and commentary on the world we live in, all written through a radically anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and abolitionist critical lens.

I originally started culture shock as no more mangoes, a blog which focused on migration, diaspora, and cultural identity and sought to move beyond the overplayed tropes and surface-level analyses that plague so much contemporary diasporic writing. Since then, however, I’ve expanded the scope of the blog to focus on cultural criticism and commentary more generally, and here you can expect to find essays about everything from parasociality on social media to neocolonialism in the 21st century.

A bit about me—I’m the child of two Indian immigrants to the United States, and I was born and raised in a suburb of Saint Paul, Minnesota. I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2018 to pursue undergraduate studies at the George Washington University, where (like absolutely everyone else at GW) I double-majored in political science and international affairs, with a minor in peace studies and a concentration in conflict resolution. In September 2022 I moved to London to get my master’s degree in human rights from the London School of Economics, and in September 2023 I returned to D.C. to work as Director of Organizing and Advocacy Campaigns at Hindus for Human Rights. In July 2024, I moved back to Minneapolis to begin a PhD in Political Science at the University of Minnesota!