Chineseness in Sino-Malay printing: a triptych of self-criticism

Abstract

ABSTRACT From late-colonial times, Chinese-Indonesian writers began formulating competing notions of belonging and diasporic identity. Two political ideologies coexisted. The first and oldest was rooted in the ideals of the 1911 Revolution and encouraged the Indies Chinese to devote themselves to the “fatherland.” This movement attempted to resinicise those culturally hybrid Peranakan families in particular. The second group perceived the Indonesian archipelago as its home and advocated for more integration into the Indies society, often in solidarity with Indigenous people. The resulting tensions manifested themselves on the pages of vernacular publications. This article juxtaposes journalism, fiction and poetry as mutually reinforcing platforms to articulate, problematise and debate Chineseness. These genres and the slightly different messages they produced reveal evolving worldviews and a lack of consensus as key Indies Chinese experiences. Periodicals started exhibiting a greater diversity of opinions by the 1930s. A similar tendency is seen in novels and short stories in which pro-China and pro-Indies factions were often criticised in roughly equal measure. These fictionalised debates offer valuable insights into society’s faults and fissures. Fiction is relevant as it grappled with otherwise elusive social taboos, such as romantic encounters between different communities. Lastly, poetry was the genre par excellence to express frustration, aided by the rhetorical devices of sarcasm and translingual creativity. Across these genres, language proves crucial to understanding society’s conflicting expressions of Chineseness. While most of the discourse took place in vernacular Malay, acculturation through profuse borrowing from Hokkien helped to forge a discourse of identification and belonging.