Kartini, Inlandsche kunstnijverheid and Dutch Imperial Policy in the East Indies, 1898–1904

Abstract

This article concerns a colonial "moment" when Native arts and crafts (Inlandsche kunstnijverheid) became an object of a multifocal public discourse. This was generated in the context of a flurry of Dutch national, international, and colonial exhibitions and the formulation of new colonial policy that took place around the turn of the twentieth century. The "exhibition" provided a physical and a rhetorical presence for Native arts and crafts to be employed to project assumptions about race, civilization, and national identity and competing colonial policy trajectories. The article explores representations of "the Native" generated by these colonial and imperial discourses from the vantage point of the archive of Raden Ajeng Kartini, an emerging "voice" of a modernizing Javanese national consciousness, and indirectly involved "behind the scenes" in a rapid succession of Dutch colonial, national, and international exhibitions between 1898 and 1903. Using contemporary media, the article explores the gap between Kartini's celebration of Javanese arts and crafts as an expression of Javanese identity and the assumptions of contemporary European exhibition curators, commentators, and "progressive" colonial policy makers in relation to Inlandsch kunstnijverheid in this particular moment in the history of modern Indonesia.