We are (not) monkeys

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 2019 anti‐racism protests erupted across the Indonesian‐controlled region of West Papua. Organized largely by Papuan students, the protests expressed Papuans’ frustration with their oppression at the hands of the Indonesian state. During the protests, Papuan demonstrators repurposed the racialized figure of the monkey—a species routinely deployed in Indonesian discourse to deprecate Papuans as primitive and backward. In doing so, they harnessed the monkey's animality to support their demands for emancipation from Indonesian rule and to redeem nonhuman beings as consequential and meaningful entities in their own right. In this context, the monkey as political symbol undermined, legitimized, and enabled processes of collective identification among Indigenous activists. The animal's symbolic mobilization in turn foregrounded the more‐than‐human dimensions of Papuans’ struggle for sovereignty—one in which humans and nonhumans sit in alternately indexical or antithetical relation to each other as contested cosmopolitical actors and world makers. [racism, political symbols, monkeys, cosmopolitics, sovereignty, West Papua, Indonesia]