‘We are people of the Islands’: translocal belonging among the ethnic Chinese of the Riau Islands

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Riau Islands Chinese are an anomaly in the study of Chinese Indonesians. For one, while many of their ethnic Chinese counterparts in other parts of Indonesia can no longer speak Chinese due to the New Order regime’s assimilation policy, Chinese languages are alive and well in the Riau Islands. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2017–2018, this paper seeks to understand the Riau Islands Chinese’s cultural resilience and sense of belonging as a borderland ethnic minority. I argue that long-standing inter-Island and cross-border mobilities and cultural flows with Singapore have been central to the maintenance of Riau Islands Chinese identity. Utilising translocality as a theoretical framework to understand the processes of identity formation and place-making that transcend national borders, I contend that the case study of the Riau Islands Chinese challenges the conventional state-centric modes of analyses prevalent in the study of ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.