Postcolonial Indonesia Research Articles

Chinese cemeteries in Indonesian colonial and post-colonial urban areas: Resistance, urban expansion, nationalistic aspiration, and post-colonial governmentality

Chinese quarters played a significant role in numerous Southeast Asian port cities, with Chinese trading communities thriving for hundreds of years. The proof of the importance of these communities is evident in the presence of Chinatowns and Chinese cemeteries, serving as places for both living and death, in several coastal cities in Southeast Asia. This study investigates Chinese cemeteries in Semarang’s spatial city structure during the colonial period and the gradual transformation of these cemeteries in post-colonial Indonesia amidst turbulent urban development and political conditions. In post-colonial Southeast Asia, city development serves as a platform for nationalistic aspirations. This article explores the roles of Chinese cemeteries as an act of subversion against colonial laws and their gradual disappearance due to city expansion in post-colonial Indonesia. The exploration through the colonial policies concerning land and the placement of the Chinese community, followed by post-colonial policies and urban governmentality on city development and real urban growth practices, provides an opportunity to discuss the roles of Chinese cemeteries for the Indonesian Chinese community in Semarang and their fate in post-colonial urban areas of Indonesia.

Introduction: remobilisation within Porous polities: ex-combatants’ claims-making in post-colonial Indonesia, Vietnam and Mozambique

This special issue addresses the challenges that former freedom fighters faced in post-colonial Indonesia, Vietnam and Mozambique under porous political and difficult economic conditions within the new societies they helped to create. Drawing on the concept of contentious politics, the contributions in this special issue critically engage with notions of ‘reintegration’, demonstrating the political obstacles, economic uncertainties, and the reoccurrence of violence. The articles concern themselves with how ex-combatants attempted to secure a livelihood in post-colonial polities and adapt to new socio-political realities within newly created states and societies in flux. Ex-combatants’ claims stemmed from having risked their lives for independence but also from a marked feeling of being left out as new, independent states formed around them. The contributions seek out the limits of the contested nature of ex-combatants’ claims-making via its social, economic, political but also its psychosocial dimensions. Taken together, the contributions put in perspective disillusion, political contention by violent and non-violent means, and the limits of state support.

Women's Dharma: Parwati Soepangat and Buddhist Feminist Theology in Postcolonial Indonesia*

This article uses the life and career of Parwati Soepangat as a case study to shed light on the narrative of Buddhist women in postcolonial Indonesia. It contends that, unlike Theravāda Buddhist‐majority nations in mainland Southeast Asia, Indonesia's lack of a patriarchal monastic authority allowed Buddhist women, like Parwati Soepangat, to emerge within the Indonesian Buddhayāna movement. This movement, advocating for inclusive and nonsectarian indigenous Buddhism, aimed to promote “Indonesian Buddhism” (agama Buddha Indonesia) as a diverse yet unified religion in harmony with the motto of “Unity in Diversity.” Through the examination of interviews, Buddhist publications, periodicals, and Parwati Soepangat's personal writings, this research delves into her dual minority status — both as a Buddhist and a woman — in a predominantly Muslim nation. As this article will illustrate, Parwati Soepangat championed the concept of “Buddhist feminist theology” (teologi feminis Buddha) and simultaneously advocated for gender equality and women's empowerment as strategic approaches to propagate Buddhist teachings throughout Indonesia and amplify women's participation in the Indonesian Buddhayāna movement.

Meditation matters: The politics and networks of yoga and spiritual reform between Indonesia, India and the West, 1900s–1970s

ABSTRACTStarting from sites of yogic and Buddhist learning connecting Indonesia and India this article explores the politics, practices, transformation, dissemination and uses of knowledge on yoga and meditation in late colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, and their relation to moral geographies of Greater India. It follows, across (violent) regime changes, the trajectories of learning of a number of self-made experts and entrepreneurs in this field who were also involved in the postcolonial Buddhist reform movement in Indonesia: the Chinese Indonesians Souw Tjiang Poh (b.1929), better known, also as yoga guru, under his Buddhist name Yogamurti; and his meditation teacher, Tee Boan An (1923–2002), who, as Ashin Jinarakkhita, is more famous as motor behind the Buddhist reform movement in Indonesia from the 1950s onwards. Yogamurti's and Tee Boan An's histories of ‘yogic’ transformation reach back to ‘alternative’ spiritual reform trajectories of the Theosophical Society of late colonial times, and continue, across decolonization and the violent regime change of 1965, to those of the hippie trail of the 1970s. These spiritual and ‘Indic’ religious revivalist entrepreneurs provide alternative perspectives to the grand narratives of political history, yoga, ‘Indian religion’ or ‘Greater India’. Across regime changes, their paths crossed and they exchanged knowledge, thereby changing and reshaping social hierarchies as they moved within an ‘alternative present’ in which spirituality seemed a way to move forward to ‘alternative futures’.

Modern Priyayi and The Failure of the Third Space in Kayam’s Two Fictions

Umar Kayam’s fictions, “Kimono Biru” (Bue Kimono) and Jalan Menikung (Turning Road) retell rampant corruption plaguing most postcolonial states. The priyayi figuration in both stories, supposed to transform the third space of postcolonial Indonesia into liberative force, fails miserably. Rather than re-visiting positivist view of third space as found in many literatures, this analysis shows a re-imagination of its failure. The replacement of colonial leaders by domestic leaders does not guarantee true independence since the new middle class replicate the corrupt system for their own benefits. While corrupt priyayi thrives, the protagonist priyayi figures upholding potential transformative power in both fictions are rendered powerless in this newly independent state. Suwandi in “Kimono Biru” is an epitome of postcolonial politicians who are both politician and oligarch guarding the status quo – a system supported by money politics to manipulate the mass. Mustari, his old friend in fighting for independence from colonial Dutch, has to live a meagre live as the cost for maintaining his integrity. Similarly, in the priyayi in Jalan Menikung are also divided along similar lines. Sastradarsono’s posterity who chooses to be a corrupt military official (Nugroho) and a business tycoon (Tommi) live comfortably while those who side with the suffering mass have to live a difficult life because of their honourable idealism.

Tug-of-War: Bones and Stones as Scientific Objects in Postcolonial Indonesia

This essay examines a controversy that erupted in 2004 over the bones of a human relative discovered in Indonesia, proclaimed to be a new species named Homo floresiensis. It argues that the controversy comprised two intertwined struggles with roots in Indonesia’s colonial history. Indonesia’s transition to an independent country, it contends, gave rise to a particular set of cultural values, scientific practices, and theories that resulted in scientific objects becoming tied to national identity in ways that shaped the debates. Highlighting the imbalances that can occur in cross-cultural negotiations over the study of human relatives, this essay reveals that the circulation of scientific objects is not a simple process. By focusing on how anthropological objects moved—and the claims of ownership and access embedded in those movements—it illustrates the role of local circumstances in shaping that knowledge as it contributes to increasingly global science.

Settler cities in the Dutch Indies: Race, class and the emergence of settler colonialism

This article explores the colonial land tenure system which evolved in the municipalities of the Dutch Indies in the early twentieth century, resulting in structural differences in urban property ownership. The development of a formal and informal property regime during this period created the logic of racialised capitalism that underpinned settler colonialism. By looking at the actions of the Indo-Europeesche Verbond (IEV), the main Indo-European political party, this article seeks to understand why settler colonialism failed in the Dutch Indies. It finds that the success of the settler colonialism project depended on its relationship with global capitalism and imperial support. This study also finds that structural differences in property ownership have continued in postcolonial Indonesia.

Human Beings and Social Structure in Frantz Fanon’s Philosophical Thought

In response to the Colonial discriminative and exclusive concept of humanism, Frantz Fanon, an Algerian postcolonial thinker, proposes that the idea of humanism needs to be inclusive. To avoid the trap of the essentialist concept of humanism, Fanon argues that our understanding of human beings needs always to be connected with the existing social structure. By utilizing a postcolonial theory as a lens of analysis, this study will explore Frantz Fanon’s existential concept of human existence and investigate his philosophical-political thoughts. This exploration is driven by these critical questions: how is Fanon’s new understanding of the existential concept of human existence, which he proposes as a more inclusive concept? How does Fanon draw the correlation between human existence and social structure? What is the significance of his thoughts to critically investigate the socio-political structure in the postcolonial Indonesia? Our critical research will focus mainly on several of Fanon’s works: The Wretched of the Earth, Toward the African Revolution, and Black Skin White Masks. His other works will certainly be considered. We will utilize a litterer critical analysis method in approaching these works of Fanon. This new concept of Fanonian humanism, we argue, gives a theoretical frame and direction to develop existentially our understanding of an inclusive Indonesian humanism.

The Construction of House and Body Spaces in Modern Indonesian Poetry

House and body are two postcolonial spaces that poets often write in their poems. This study aims to analyze the construction of house and body spaces in three modern Indonesian poems. There is a semiotic and symbolic relationship between the spaces and the social facts in postcolonial Indonesia. Upstone’s postcolonial space theory is applied in this research to reveal how the spaces represent the poets’ view of postcolonial Indonesia. The data sources are poetry written by Chairil Anwar, Rendra, and Goenawan Mohamad. This qualitative descriptive research analyzes the poems’ lines or stanzas containing house and body spaces. The data were collected through a literature study, namely, reading the selected poetry texts seriously and deeply. The results show that the house and body spaces in the poetry represent Indonesia in the postcolonial space that was suffered, depressed, and lonely due to migration, hybridity, and multiple identities.

Reshaping Liturgy in Postcolonial Indonesia

Reshaping Liturgy in Postcolonial Indonesia

Regimented Islamophobia : Islam, State, and Governmentality in Indonesia

<p>This article discusses the arts of governing Islam in Indonesia, a majority Muslim country, which is neither secular nor Islamic. It tries to explain how the premise of governmentality is modelled into the state structure and politics. Rather than seeing Islamophobia as a cultural practice, the article argues that Islamophobia develops partly because of power relations between the ruler and the ruled, or as I call it “regimented Islamophobia”. It is the fear of “Islamic threats” – whether real or imagined – that is deemed as a potent challenge to regimes’ power and authority. While the notion of majority-minority relation remains essential to analyse the forms of Islamophobia, this article offers a new insight of how political regimes exercise “governmentality practices” or the arts of governing Islam and controlling Muslim aspirations. This practice of governmentality is a key strategy to pacify Islam during the colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. As far as Indonesian political history is concerned, this governmentality practice is old wine in a new bottle; it is the technique Dutch colonial government and the regimes following the Indonesian independence have exercised for subjugating Islam and controlling aspirations of its believers.</p>

Displacing Political Islam in Indonesia

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the narrative of Islamic nationalism in twentieth-century Indonesia, focussing on the experience of, and discourse surrounding, the self-identified Islamist Darul Islam movement and its leader, S. M. Kartosuwiryo (1905–1962). I offer a narrative of the independence struggle that counters the one advanced by Indonesia's Pancasila state, and allows us to capture subtleties that old discussions of separatism—with their assumption of fixed centres and peripheries—cannot illuminate.The article unfolds three historical threads connected to ideas of exile and displacement (physical and intellectual), and the reconstitution (successful or failed) that followed from those processes. Starting from the political circumstances under which Kartosuwiryo retreated to West Java after the Dutch reinvasion of 1947—in a form of physical exile and political displacement from the centre of politics to the periphery, from a position of political centrality to one of marginality and opposition—I then transition to an elaboration of Kartosuwiryo's ideology. His political strategy emerges as a form of voluntary intellectual displacement that bounced between local visions of authority, nationalist projects, and transregional imaginations in order to establish the political platform he envisioned for postcolonial Indonesia. Lastly, I argue that the elision of Islam from the reconstructed narrative of Kartosuwiryo's intentions, characterised as separatist and anti-nationalist, was a key aspect of Indonesia's nation-building process. It is my final contention that official Indonesian history's displacement of Kartosuwiryo's goals away from Islam and into the realm of separatism allowed for two reconstitutive processes, one pertaining to political Islam as a negative political force, and the other to Kartosuwiryo as a martyr for Islam.

Spooks, goons, ‘intellectuals’: The military–catholic network in the Cold War diplomacy of Suharto’s Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article foregrounds a case of informal diplomacy with far reaching consequences for the international politics of postcolonial Indonesia and capitalist Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The case is Suharto’s New Order Indonesia (1966–1998), where the Republic’s diplomacy was dominated not by the foreign ministry but by a small elite network (jaringan) of sectarian activists of Catholic faith allied with military officers of an intelligence background against Communism and Islam. Operating under the patronage of intelligence czar Ali Murtopo, this jaringan emerged as a powerful and conservative channel of influence on the early New Order and steered some of its major diplomatic initiatives: from the covert diplomacy that ended Konfrontasi, and the founding and elaboration of ASEAN’s diplomacy, to planning and justifying the annexation of East Timor in 1975. The article moves in three steps. One, it situates the New Order’s informal diplomats in the long arc of diplomacy in postcolonial Indonesia. Two, it atomizes this network in sociological terms and probes how the habitus of its members shaped the substance and style of their diplomatic practices. Three, it examines the main foreign policy initiatives of this network. This Indonesian case brings to the study of informal diplomacy an appreciation of how partisan networks embedded in domestic and international circuits – rather than standalone individuals – shore up a strongman. It also offers insight into the tortured fightback by actors of ‘formal’ diplomacy as they come under the assault of informal diplomats and their patrons.

The Contrapuntal Reading of Colonial Logic and the Play of Caricature in “Houseboy + Maid” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s works are highly distinguished for their strong realist characteristic and profound analysis of interactions among pre- and post- colonial human beings and their place in society. One of the works that portray such characteristics is “Houseboy + Maid”, the first story in Toer’s collection Tales from Djakarta: Caricatures of Circumstances and Their Human Beings. In this research, post-colonialism and contrapuntal reading proposed by Edward Said are used as methods to interpret a literary work whose narration is about two characters who live in post-colonial Indonesia, or rather post-revolutionary Indonesia. Their unfixed identities which are interrelated through the changing event of the plot indicates that their very destiny cannot be separated from the “politicality, sociality, and historicality” of much bigger entities.

ISLAMICATE CIVILIZATION AND NATIONAL ISLAMS: ISLAM NUSANTARA, WEST JAVA AND SUNDANESE CULTURE

Relationships between Islam and local cultures, post-coloniality, the construction of National Islams and nationalisms are extraordinarily complex. They pose complex academic, theological and political problems. This paper considers examples from the province of West Java in post-colonial Indonesia. It will be concerned with the ways in which elements of local West Javanese/Sundanese culture are rejected by Islamist nationalists but at the same time incorporated into a regional variant of the culture friendly Islam Nusantara formulated by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in 2015. See Chamami (2015) and Woodward (2018). It also suggests that what Philosopher of Science Karl Popper termed the “situational logic” of Islam Nusantara is based on principles that have driven the construction of what Historian Marshal Hodgson (1974) termed Islamicate Civilizations since they emerged in the sixth century.
 Thorough consideration of these questions requires an overarching analytic and theoretical framework. Without one, we can produce disconnected, fragmentary analyses with limited practical applications. This paper is an attempt to establish such a framework. Building on Berger’s constructivist approach to the Sociology of Religion, it draws on seemingly divergent themes in the academic discourse about religion/society/state relationships in hope that the resulting synthesis will be of greater analytic utility and practical applicability than the sum of its parts. Empirically it focuses on West Java, Sundanese culture and emergence of alternative National Islams in contemporary Indonesia. It also makes comparative references to neighbouring countries, especially Malaysia. Theoretically, it is transdisciplinary, combining approaches from Cultural Anthropology, History, Political Science and Religious Studies. Given the current state of intra-Islamic political and religious discourse, it also necessarily focuses on debates between Sufi oriented “traditionalists” and Salafi oriented “modernists” that have been a major feature of colonial and post-colonial Muslim discourse for more than a century. It argues that alternative National Islams are shaped by a combination of theological debates and religion/state/society dynamics.

The Pain of Being Hybrid: Catholic Writers and Political Islam in Postcolonial Indonesia

Informed by postcolonial theories and approaches, and based on the works of three Indonesian Catholic writers, this essay looks at the ways in which these writers address the question of identity. They propose the notion of hybrid identity where the identity of the nation is built upon different layers of racial, ethnic, and religious belongings, and loyalties to local tradition and aspirations for modernity. While this notion of identity is inspired by the framework of “catholicity”, it is also “postcolonial” for a number of reasons. First, its formation betrays traces of colonial conditions and negotiations of power. Second, it reflects the subject position of these writers as Indonesian natives who embraced a religion that has complex ties to European colonialism and problematic relations with Islam. Third, it criticizes the post-colonial state and society, which perpetuate many of the ills of the colonial political system, including racism and the abuse of power. Their discourse also reveals the pain of being hybrid, mainly in their inability to appropriately tackle the question of political Islam. The recent political upheaval reveals the need for more creative engagement with political Islam in order for this hybrid identity to work.

DISKRESI KEPOLISIAN DALAM PENYELESAIAN PERKARA PIDANA BERBASIS KEARIFAN LOKAL

The purpose of writing this article is to explain the discretion of the police in the settlement of criminal cases based on local wisdom. This study uses an empirical method, by conducting interviews. Law enforcement in post-colonial Indonesia becomes formal and rigid and bureaucratic. Justice is as if it can only be obtained in an institution called court, so that in many cases the judicial process continues even though the parties have personally made peace. Police discretion as permitted by Police law is the most ideal step or way to change the rigidity of law enforcement. Certainly the discretion referred to here must be accountable on the basis of common interests, humanity and justice. This needs to be done in order to move the law into an Indonesian context based on local wisdom.

Independent Woman in Postcolonial Indonesia: Rereading the Works of Rukiah

Independent Woman in Postcolonial Indonesia: Rereading the Works of Rukiah

From A Colonial to A National Company: The Nationalization of Western Private Plantation in Indonesia

This paper discusses the nationalization of Dutch-owned enterprises in post-colonial Indonesia in a process termed Indonesianisasi. It looks at the legal framework necessary for the transfer of assets. It also looks into the process of nationalization in some companies and the regulations created in order to create a semblance of due process.

Towards the westernized body: a popular narrative reinforced by men's lifestyle magazines in Indonesia

ABSTRACTThis paper will spotlight changing views with regard to Indonesian men's body aesthetics. It will explore how, in response to discourse contained in lifestyle magazines, the physical bodies of Indonesian men have become the primary mechanism through which to exercise agency. However, many local Indonesian customs consider men's agency to be dependent upon their ability to control bodily desire. The paper aims to give an overview of how modernization and westernization as contemporary conditions in postcolonial Indonesia serve as the background to the narratives provided by men's lifestyle magazines. In order to provide an insight into how modern white narratives are valued in Indonesia, I will begin by examining the history of Dutch colonialism as a basis for racial classification. Proceeding, I will discuss how that history relates to contemporary practices of social stratification: the belief that being married to a westerner will bring perfection to one's descendants’ genes; the trend of consuming special vitamins and formulas that will change particular parts of the body; and the assumption that having western genes will bring both success and wealth. Moreover, I will also discuss the ways in which the magazines define the “ideal” body, and how that “ideal” body thus becomes the hegemonic body – one that functions as the gateway for men to achieve a good life.