The Search for Sensuous Geographies of Absence

Ana Dragojlovic

doi:10.1163/22134379-17004015

Abstract

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland engage with geographies of loss, and how travel serves as an active process of mediation. My focus is on Indies (Indonesian-Dutch) migrants and their descendants living in the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic material I explore how migrants’ descendants associate colonial times and ancestral homelands with narrative strategies of exclusion and containment and tempo doeloe discourses (a nostalgic longing for the ‘good old days’) as generative of a collective victimhood. I seek to unravel how descendants explore agentic modalities of travel in order to reactivate, re-embody, and thus intervene in their families’ and collective histories. The article analyses how affective experiences of places of and far beyond the geographical locations of the Dutch East Indies have a potential to invigorate embodied Indies sensibilities. Thus, I write towards a theory of intergenerational transmission and felt dispositions in relation to old, multiracial diasporas such as the Indies. I argue that searches for sensuous geographies of absence are a specific modality of genealogy work that serves as a vehicle through which to move across and among different times in order to destabilize postcolonial temporalities.

Highlights

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland employ travel as an active contestation against the inheritance of loss
The present article has demonstrated how Indies preoccupations with absence are constituted in a conviction that the self is related to cultural and geographical elsewheres, making mobility and travel an intrinsic part of Indies explorative practices and narratives of belonging
I have shown that Indies travel and mobility serves as a vehicle through which subjects who have heritages linked to the Dutch East Indies can attain temporal proximity to embodied collective memories

Summary

Introduction

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland employ travel as an active contestation against the inheritance of loss. My interlocutors clearly and keenly wished to distinguish their search into their families’ and collective Indies histories from tempo doeloe This presents us with a clear generational demarcation in which descendants do not see themselves as subjects longing for the Dutch East Indies, as for many this represents a morally unacceptable longing for racial, cultural, and socio-economic superiority. Unlike postmemory, which is mediated primarily between parents and children, Landsberg (2004) argues that media technologies have the power to produce memories In this view, the rich visual productions of feature films and documentaries about the Dutch East Indies and the rich literary production about life in the colony are active contributors to the production of memories of the places and events which the migrants’ descendants did not live through. What came across in my transnational ethnographic material was that regardless of their countries of citizenship, descendants of Indies migrants share a notion of contested geographies of home and belonging. The following narrative introduces readers to the contested notion of home and belonging through an account of how bodies feel the world, providing a starting point for the discussion on how sensuous experiences of place are neither ahistorical nor

15 In her Domicile and diaspora

Concluding Remarks