A javanese diaspora? gender and identity politics in indonesia's transmigration resettlement program

Abstract

Diaspora has gained wide currency in conceptualizing international migration in the context of global capitalist change, poverty, and violence. It provides a useful way of framing identities that refuse the essentialism of “nation” and that challenge the idea of an ahistorical indigenous identity. This paper takes up the concept of diaspora as a starting point for a consideration of the Indonesian government's transmigration resettlement scheme. As a cultural project, transmigration has been interpreted by some commentators as a process of “Javanization,” as outer island cultures are displaced by the cultural practices associated with an influx of Javanese migrants. I explore the tension between the permissible “Javanese” cultural identity that is promulgated through the resettlement process and the emergent identitites of migrants whose “Javaneseness” is unstable and incomplete. Gender is seen as crucial to this tension, as dominant Indonesian state discourses of gendered Javanese identity are disrupted by the gender discourses of the transmigrants themselves.