Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

by Arnout van der Meer

Overview

Performing Power illuminates how colonial dominance in Indonesia was legitimized, maintained, negotiated, and contested through the everyday staging and public performance of power between the colonizer and colonized.

Arnout Van der Meer's Performing Power explores what seemingly ordinary interactions reveal about the construction of national, racial, social, religious, and gender identities as well as the experience of modernity in colonial Indonesia. Through acts of everyday resistance, such as speaking a different language, withholding deference, and changing one's appearance and consumer behavior, a new generation of Indonesians contested the hegemonic colonial appropriation of local culture and the racial and gender inequalities that it sustained. Over time these relationships of domination and subordination became inverted, and by the twentieth century the Javanese used the tropes of Dutch colonial behavior to subvert the administrative hierarchy of the state.

Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501758591
Publisher:	Southeast Asia Program Publications
Publication date:	02/15/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
Sales rank:	388,343
File size:	4 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Arnout van der Meer is an Associate Professor of History at Colby College. Learn more about Arnout on his website at web.colby.edu/arnoutvandermeer/

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Performance of Power
1. Setting the Stage: The Javanization of Colonial Authority in the Nineteenth Century
2. "Sweet was the Dream, Bitter the Awakening": The Contested Implementation of the Ethical Policy, 1901–1913
3. Disrupting the Colonial Performance: The Hormat Circular of 1913 and the National Awakening
4. Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies: From Ethnic Stereotypes to National Dress
5. East Is East, and West Is West: Forging Modern Identities
6. Staging Colonial Modernity: Hegemony, Fairs, and the Indonesian Middle Classes
Epilogue: Pawnshops as Stages of the Colonial Performance of Power

What People are Saying About This

Joost Coté

Performing Power explores the changing dynamics within the cultural spaces where Europeans and representatives of a modernizing Javanese community interacted. It gives new life and meaning to the condition of colonial modernity and its relation to Indonesian modernity and nationalism.

Joost Coté

"Performing Power explores the changing dynamics within the cultural spaces where Europeans and representatives of a modernizing Javanese community interacted. It gives new life and meaning to the condition of colonial modernity and its relation to Indonesian modernity and nationalism."

Heather Streets-Salter

This book demonstrates that power and resistance in colonial Indonesia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exercised in everyday interactions and expressed concretely in the material world. An important work that will be valuable for scholars of Indonesia and of imperialism and colonialism much more generally.

Editorial Reviews

Arnout van der Meer's book seeks to address the lacuna and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the novel aspects of European colonialism in Indonesia, especially in Java. Van der Meer examines how Dutch power was built and maintained through language, clothing, customs, etiquette, status symbols, sitting positions, physical gestures, postures, food consumption, architecture, and urban planning.

The Unversity of British Columbia

The books focus on material culture and quotidian realities is its biggest strength as the vivid and fine-grained descriptions make for engagining reading.

Sojourn

Performing Power is a sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written contribution to the historical scholarship on colonialism in Indonesia, demonstrating the richness and diversity among Indonesians debating competing notions of civil and human rights, morality, piety, modernity, agency, and an emerging national identity.

KNHG/BMGN - Susie Protschky

The books focus on material culture and quotidian realities is its biggest strength as the vivid and fine-grained descriptions make for engagining reading.

-- "Sojourn"

Arnout van der Meer's book seeks to address the lacuna and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the novel aspects of European colonialism in Indonesia, especially in Java. Van der Meer examines how Dutch power was built and maintained through language, clothing, customs, etiquette, status symbols, sitting positions, physical gestures, postures, food consumption, architecture, and urban planning.

-- "The Unversity of British Columbia"

Performing Power is a sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written contribution to the historical scholarship on colonialism in Indonesia, demonstrating the richness and diversity among Indonesians debating competing notions of civil and human rights, morality, piety, modernity, agency, and an emerging national identity.

--Susie Protschky, Deakin University "KNHG/BMGN"

From the Publisher