Creative Industry and Imagined Communities: A Case Study of Yogyakarta Creative City

Abstract

The creative industry in Yogyakarta, specifically, the independent film industry, has been taking a prime role in promoting controversial films that encourages the communities to thinker with their own notions of national identity in Indonesia, since the post-reformation era. As such, the independent film community exudes its own culture of imagined community (on national identity), which resides within the multi-faceted supply chain of the film/creative industry community. This creative industry and its cultural producers, actively builds a media agenda on national identity discourse, such that the industry, acts as catalyst for the diverse communities to experience the ‘sameness’ and evolved ‘sameness’, of their own mental/emotional construction of national identity(ies), and in this process, questions the notion of social cohesion and societal well-being, and sustainability within the country. Based on a research on Yogyakarta creative city case study, this article will: 1) describe the extant and nature of imagined communities, on national identity(ies) amongst representatives of the societies, 2) explain the role of the independent film community in the nature of such imagined communities, through its cultural production services, namely, the films and related cultural productions within the creative industry supply chain, and 3) evaluate the myriad and multiple (national) identities, which are being negotiated/propagated or even sidelined/submerged.