Cosmopolitan Visions: Ethnic Chinese and the Photographic Imagining of Indonesia in the Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial Periods

Abstract

The history of photography in Indonesia reveals Chinese Indonesians—members of a marginalized, transnational minority—as active participants in the project of nation making, rendering visible the cosmopolitan origins of national formations. In the early postcolonial period, Chinese Indonesian amateur and studio photographers acted as cultural brokers who mediated global currents and reworked colonial-era conventions to forge new national visual idioms. The specific cosmopolitanisms of these two distinct groups of ethnic Chinese photographers yielded divergent iconographies that have remained important strands in Indonesia's visual and political culture, in which a nostalgic ideology of the “asli” (authentic, original, or indigenous) competes with an outward-looking vision of Indonesia as a location from which to participate in global modernity.