Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon ed. by Paul Bijl and Grace V. S. Chin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon ed. by Paul Bijl and Grace V. S. Chin Howard M. Federspiel (bio) Paul Bijl and Grace V. S. Chin, eds. Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010. 198 pp. Kartini (1879–1904) was a Javanese writer and social thinker in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries. Born in a hereditary governor’s family, she was educated by Dutch tutors, and took full advantage of her education during her brief lifetime. As a young woman, she began correspondences with several Dutch women, in Dutch, in which she outlined life in her father’s palace and pronounced it out of touch with modernity. She called for reform of societal values, particularly in the areas of women’s education and matrimony. Her writing was enthusiastically welcomed by Dutch administrators and their wives, largely on the assumption that she wanted Indies’ society to develop along European lines, which was only partially true. Kartini founded a school for girls, married, and died in childbirth at the age of twenty-four. Her tragic death at a young age gave fuel to her rise as a cultural icon, and that status was officially recognized in 1945 (as the Indies became independent Indonesia) when her birthday was made a national holiday. This thin volume of eight essays tells us something of Kartini, but a lot more about the development of the Indonesian nation since her demise in 1904. The six “core” articles offer differing interpretations of Kartini’s actual influence that have risen to “fit” Kartini into various historical scenarios and, especially, how most of those interpretations have wandered considerably from Kartini’s own mindset, weltanschauung, and original role in colonial society. Of the six authors writing the essays—five women and one male—three are from Australia and one each are from the United States, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. All are well-published with articles and books on Southeast Asian scholarly studies to their credit. Unfortunately, there is no Indonesian among them. The first article, by Joost Coté, shows Kartini as a cultural broker between Javanese participants and Dutch colonial personalities, both men and women. Through her correspondence with Dutch women, Kartini told much about her own life as a daughter of a well-to-do Javanese official and the lifestyle of such an official and his family. On the other hand, Kartini’s correspondence with men promoted the handicrafts of nearby Javanese artisans and gave them an outlet for the sale of their creations in Batavia and the Netherlands. Coté asserts that, through both activities, Kartini became a cultural window and inadvertently encouraged Dutch policy in the early years of the twentieth century that sought cooperation with “modernizing” elements of the Javanese population (38). That is a more sophisticated interpretation of Kartini’s correspondence than is generally recognized. The next article, by Paul Bijl, like the first, deals with Kartini’s impact on non-Indonesian actors, in this case on two Western political thinkers in the 1960s. Bijl [End Page 107] contends that Eleanor Roosevelt, sharpening her own arguments for “equality, identification, and cooperation” in a post-colonial world (66–69), needed heroes from the non-Western world and found, in Kartini, a worthy example. Roosevelt lavished praise on Kartini for her hard work in learning a foreign language well enough to tap into the new scientific and technological world emerging during her lifetime. Bijl then contrasts Roosevelt’s optimistic (and very American) view with that of the French scholar Louis Massignon, who envisioned a very sophisticated and culturally rich background in which to measure Kartini, which included European and Islamic cultural histories. He concluded that Kartini properly belonged in that setting, but had only the position as a “minor saint.” Apparently, he was not as impressed with Kartini as Roosevelt was. The essays by Grace Chin and Kathryn Robinson view Kartini as an ingredient in the creation of an Indonesian national history as it took place during the Sukarno, Suharto, Reformasi, and “Just Now” eras of Indonesian national development. Chin notes that Kartini’s...