Description
Women remain largely absent from present and historical takes on foreign policy. This applies not only to high-level diplomatic arenas. It also pertains to those everyday spaces which receive less scholarly and public attention, including international schools or cultural institutes and the hierarchies that are inscribed into them as part of exclusive diplomatic communities - especially in postcolonial contexts. As feminist research in International Relations and Political Sociology demonstrates, women’s accounts provide crucial insight into the complex structural and social relations that uphold any kind of institution and their interrelatedness with global politics and histories. Following this premise, this paper argues that women’s memory can bring a unique perspective on the everyday workings of cultural diplomatic institutions. In consequence, this paper poses the following questions: What does women’s memory uncover about everyday expressions of gender, race and coloniality in diplomatic spaces? What can we learn about everyday knowledge practices and systems therein? And how can it challenge or disrupt hegemonic narratives in the foreign policy archive? To answer these questions, this paper centers on Indian and German women’s memory of the German school and cultural institute Max Mueller Bhavan. It juxtaposes archival material with women’s memory to illustrate how these institutions were spaces of social reproduction while being centers of (cultural) power in postcolonial Delhi between 1961 – 1999. This approach highlights not only gendered and racialized absences in the political archive. It also illuminates the interrelatedness of everyday cultural foreign policy with global and regional political developments, including the emergence and collapse of bipolarity and, within it, the formation of post-independence India as an active foreign policy actor.
