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This Palgrave Pivot argues that if we are to understand civil conflict we need to grasp how everyday life is shaped by local conflict imaginaries. In order to examine this claim the book sets out to explore the contours of conflict imaginaries from two very different sites of conflict. Both Colombia and Indonesia have suffered from the collective trauma of political violence but in very different social, cultural and political contexts. Sketching out what they mean by a conflict imaginary, and explaining the relationship of this key concept to social imaginaries more broadly, the authors provide a historical overview of how political violence has been represented in both countries. They go o...
Everyone wants to be and to feel at home. Yet, being homely requires a space or place where one can admit feeling familiar with and the surroundings can accept the person. What does it mean then to be in a liminal space where one is considered not this or not that? In Toward an Embodied Decolonial Pneumatology: Dishoming Space, Toar Banua Hutagalung tries to analyze this existential question through a postcolonial/decolonial approach. One thing that is responsible for such liminal spaces is colonialism itself. Colonialism, through its multiple elements, such as biopolitics, racism, and sexuality, became a formation that looks like a home but is a site of oppression. Nevertheless, the author ...
Approximately one million innocent Indonesians were killed by their fellow nationals, neighbours and kin at the height of an anti-communist campaign in the mid-1960s. This book investigates the profound political consequences of these mass killings in Indonesia upon public life, highlighting the historical specificities of the violence and comparable incidents of identity politics in more recent times. Mixing theory with empirically based analysis, the book examines how the spectre of communism and the trauma experienced in the latter half of the 1960s remain critical in understanding the dynamics of terror, coercion and consent today. Heryanto challenges the general belief that the periodic anti-communist witch-hunts of recent Indonesian history are largely a political tool used by a powerful military elite and authoritarian government. Despite the profound importance of the 1965-6 events it remains one of most difficult and sensitive topics for public discussion in Indonesia today. State Terrorism and Political Identity in Indonesia is one of the first books to fully discuss the mass killings, shedding new light on a largely unspoken and unknown part of Indonesia’s history.
The essays in Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects ask how the rising preponderance of scholarship from Southeast Asia is de-centering Southeast Asian area studies in the United States. The contributions address recent transformations within the field and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation. Contributions from the perspectives of history, anthropology, cultural studies, political theory, and libraries pose questions ranging from how a concern with postcolonial and feminist questions of identity might reorient the field to how anthropological work on civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated analytic approaches. A vision common to all the contributors is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of Euro-American academic trends and scholars.
This admirable book contains fascinating autobiographical accounts, by some of Southeast Asia's most eminent scholars, concerning their struggle to find their own voices in interpreting the region to which they belong. The book should be indispensable to anyone interested in thinking about knowledge production and its politics in a postcolonial world. In the views of these scholarly Southeast Asians, we are made to see, in very personal terms, the link between the global crisis in the social sciences and the need to find remedies for it that are neither Eurocentric nor parochially anti-Western. Professor Alexander Woodside Professor of Chinese and Southeast Asian History University of Britis...
The book shows how the Chinese minority is much more diverse, and the picture much richer and more complicated, than previous studies have allowed. Subjects covered include the historical development of Chinese communities in peripheral areas of Indonesia, the religious practices of Chinese Indonesians, which are by no means confined to "Chinese" religions, and Chinese ethnic events, where a wide range of Indonesians, not just Chinese, participate.
This book focuses on the visual media, one of the key factors in shaping the contemporary ecology of colliding environments, in the fourth most populous country in the world, Indonesia. It deals with creative actors, including literary authors, television producers, video artists and community media activists, who demonstrate, reflect on, criticise and rework the multidimensional impact of the visual media in imaginative and innovative ways. Combining contemporary art and media theory with the detailed analysis of authentic texts and contexts, the author analyses the multidimensional ecological impact of the media in its role as one of the key forces of Integrated World Capitalism (IWC).
This book examines how women journalists in Malaysia negotiated male power structures, in particular structures determined by the keystone party of the ruling coalition, the United Malays National Organisation. Through both oral histories and content analysis, it looks at how women journalists in the women’s pages of the newspapers found spaces to advocate for their readers. It is thus the first work to look at the importance of the women’s pages in the Malay-language newspapers, and how apparently monolithic institutions of the authoritarian state hid diverse contests for resources and prestige. In this contest, the concept of news values, the perception of the reader and the ways in which women constructed themselves as journalists all come into play, and are examined here. The book contributes to the field of feminist media studies by examining how gendered newsroom practices paradoxically allowed women journalists in the women’s pages more editorial freedom than those in the malestream press.
Indonesia is currently affected by many serious conflicts which have arisen as a result of a variety of ethnic, religious and regional tensions. Presenting important new thinking on violent conflict in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, this book examines a selection of conflicts in detail and discusses the nature of violence and the reasons behind violent outbreaks. Chapters include analysis of conflicts in Aceh, East Timor, Maluku, Java, West Kalimantan, West Papua and elsewhere. The contributors provide analysis of political, ethnic and nationalistic killings, with a concentration on the post-Suharto era. The book goes on to examine vital questions concerning the way in which violence in Indonesia is represented in the media, and explores ways in which violent conflicts could be resolved or prevented. The last section turns the focus onto victims of violence and forms of justice and retribution.
"Language ideologies" are cultural representations, whether explicit or implicit, of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. Mediating between social structures and forms of talk, such ideologies are not only about language. Rather, they link language to identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology. Through such linkages, language ideologies underpin not only linguistic form and use, but also significant social institutions and fundamental nottions of person and community. The essays in this new volume examine definitions and conceptions of language in a wide range of societies around the world. Contributors focus on how such defining activity organizes lan...