Precarious Belongings

Affect and Nationalism in Asia

Chih-ming Wang, Daniel PS Goh, Chih-ming Wang, Daniel PS Goh

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786602244
• eBook ISBN: 9781786602268
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

In the midst of refugee crises, terrorist attacks and territorial disputes across the globe, nationalism remains a powerful force in generating affects of inclusion and exclusion. In Asia, inter-Asian migration, enabled and disrupted by a history of colonialism, capitalist globalization and political conflicts, has rendered the idea of nation as both politically distinct and culturally malleable.
Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia explores the affective politics of Asian nationalism by addressing the entwined structures of precarious belonging and national feelings. Bringing together leading scholars it looks at how the reification of nationalism in social movements, popular sentiments, online groups, and cultural representation directs hatred towards migrant and minority groups across Asia. The book posits that nationalist affects are embedded in the politics of exclusion, and seeks to make room for precarious belongings in the transnational and multicultural present. It should be of interest to students and scholars interested in Asian Cultural Studies, transnationalism, migration and nationalism.

Part I

THE DIALECTICS OF LOVE AND HATE

Chapter One

Complex Histories of the Foreign in Indonesia^*

Adrian Vickers

In July 2015, an attack took place on a Muslim prayer house in Papua. The origins of the attack were mysterious, and threatened to inflame Muslim groups, who were then said to be planning to send militias to the island in revenge. The national Coordinating Minister for Politics, Law and Security, Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno, said that besides the Free Papua Movement, “a suspicion had emerged that there were foreign elements involved who wanted to damage the harmony of religious communities in Papua” (Ratya 2015). A popular version of this kind of attitude took place a few months later, when protests broke out in many parts of Indonesia against an influx of Chinese workers. Such protests fed into antiforeigner rhetoric that was embraced by the Indonesian President Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi, garnering him support for the execution of foreigners for drug smuggling, as well as for economic protectionist measures (Robet 2015).

Ever since Benedict Anderson (1983: 129) first challenged the commonplace that love of the nation involved loathing of foreigners, love and hatred have been decoupled in discussions of nationalism. Nevertheless, there have been some criticisms of Anderson’s views, based on reflections on the resurgence of racism in the West, in particular from David Mertz, whose analysis is grounded in the work of Etienne Balibar (Mertz 1995). There is, indeed, room to reconsider the role of racism in nationalism, but this should not be based on an “either/or” view of the situation. Rather, we need to ask how complex processes of rejection and attraction hold racially classified groups in a suspended position in relation to an imaginary national majority. Given that Anderson was an Indonesianist (who died in Indonesia at the end of 2015), and that the origins of his book lie in his reading of Indonesian writers concerned with nationalism, notably Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Vickers 1991), what does the case of Indonesia say about love and hate in nationalism, and the precarious position of those considered “foreign” by those who consider themselves as constituting the nation?

The opening Indonesian examples show the kinds of antiforeign sentiment that are regular features of Indonesian public rhetoric, and they are frequently backed up by public actions or performances. They are as regular as the annual warnings to beware of communism, which is also frequently associated with foreign elements. Antiforeign sentiment is most frequently anti-Western expression, but antiforeign sentiment can also merge easily into anti-Chinese expression. There are long histories of language, representation, and events that give the impression of virulent antiforeign thought being manifested in Indonesian public life. The conventional theories of nationalism challenged by Anderson place fear of the “Other” at the heart of love of country, as in the use of the White Australia policy to help unite the Australian colonies into a national federation at the beginning of the twentieth century (Curthoys and Marcus 1978).

In the Indonesian case, while antiforeign sentiment is important for promoting state expressions of national unity, such fear results in neither abject revulsion nor great expression of love for Indonesia. At the heart of love of the nation and the rejection of the foreign in Indonesia is a set of paradoxes, expressed in regional cultures long before the nation state came into being. The Occidentalism behind antiforeign sentiment can as easily include fetishisation of the West as hatred for it, and this antipathy to the West no longer includes particularly strong anti-Dutch expression. As for anti-Chinese sentiment, this has been a feature of Indonesian culture since at least 1740, when the Javanese community of Chinese origin instigated a rebellion against the Dutch East India Company, and were the subject of a major massacre. Major anti-Chinese violence took place in 1998, in events surrounding the fall of Suharto. However, these most recent extreme actions seem to have been a climax of sentiment, and that kind of racism has not only lessened but also, to some degree, been reversed. These paradoxes and complexities are the result of complicated changes in Indonesian political culture, and in the public sphere in general. By examining contradictory or at least dialectical tendencies in the love and hatred of the foreign in Indonesia, I will attempt to map out a series of political maneuvers and social changes that show an Indonesia wherein the status of the nation and nationalist stereotypes is less firmly fixed.

THE OCCIDENT

On my first trip to Indonesia in 1972–1973, our group of school pupils from Tamworth, in rural Australia, travelled by train from Jakarta to Palembang. For reasons that have never been clear to me, on our first night in Palembang, we were besieged in our hotel in Palembang by a near-riot, apparently caused by the presence of foreigners. Possibly, this was a residual effect of the anti-Western feeling of the Sukarno era, or a result of the Suharto regime’s pacification of the population. It left me with the awareness that the status of “foreigner” involved a range of possible meanings, from “demonic,” to “threatening,” to “corrupt,” “exotic,” “wealthy,” and “desirable.” A range of experiences reinforced this, from the staring that my (very fair) daughter received in 1998 when she and I walked along the beach strip at Makassar, to the story of a female friend who in the 1980s was so heavily mobbed by a group of inquisitive East Javanese that her arms were left bruised from people pinching her white skin, to that of another female friend travelling in East Lombok in the 1980s who had a hostile farmer randomly throw a heavy object at her.

Such rhetoric as Minister Tedjo Edhy’s, mentioned at the opening of this chapter, is part of Indonesian national political culture, which makes most sense when delivered in the national language, Indonesian, while drawing on cultural resonances from Indonesia’s many local cultures. It is impossible to make accurate generalizations about the 250 million Indonesians and their 200 plus major cultures and languages, although political statements and views expressed in national media and in books circulating at the national level give some indications of what may be going on. It is clear from his statement, and this is definitely how his audience received it, that the foreigners who seek to undermine Indonesia in Papua are Westerners, and not, say, Arabs, who might have a vested interest in provoking Muslims to oppose Christians. State agents here use nationalism instrumentally, although this is not to say that they themselves do not believe in it. There are different categories of the “foreign” at work here, in which religion can create proximity and override ethnicity.

In Balinese culture, there are examples of precolonial (i.e. nineteenth century in this case) depictions of foreigners as long-nosed, eccentric, and disorderly figures. The disorder has resonances of the demonic, and there are also visual associations between foreigners and demons, red or fair hair and tallness, for example. More often, however, it is their uncontrolled and unrefined natures that are represented in such works, and this is at best an ambiguous force (Vickers 1984). The traditional kind of imagery is not unique to Bali; it is also found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century depictions of Dutch in Javanese manuscripts, notably the possibly-late-eighteenth century Selat Damar Wulan manuscript (British Library Javanese MS 89). A similar manuscript, the Serat Selarasa of 1804 (British Library Javanese MS 28), features many images of ships with Dutch flags, suggesting a fascination with European technology. It remains an open question as to whether there was a separation between foreigners as people and their technology, but these works suggest that the exoticism of the Dutch was linked to the modernity embodied in the vessels.

The nineteenth-century example from traditional painting laid a precedent for twentieth-century artists to present a set of playful depictions of foreigners. Balinese modernist Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, for example, was close to the Swiss artist Theo Meier from the late 1930s to the 1950s, and in the 1960s befriended Australian artist Donald Friend. Both Meier and Friend were the subjects of Rai’s work, memorably in his depictions of Meier making love in the water with his Balinese wife, Ni Made Pegi. In various playful, erotic scenes, Made Pegi is the more prominent figure, definitely active in the relationship. Rai depicted other kinds of foreigners, notably Japanese during the Occupation, who were shown as stridently oppressive, much more negative figures than the Westerners (Vickers and Haks 2006).

By the twentieth century, a generalized conception of “the West” had entered Indonesian discourse and visual orders of representation. One late twentieth-century version of this was paranoia about Hippies as culturally corrupting. Again, Bali was the focus of discussions about Hippies influencing youth through their long hair, use of drugs, and advocacy of free sex, since Bali was the site where contact with Westerners has been the most intense (Picard 1996: 78–79). As observed by Michel Picard and I Nyoman Darma Putra, the two major commentators on Balinese-Western interactions, these are fundamentally ambivalent interactions. Balinese professor of tourism Darma Putra, working with Michael Hitchcock, has shown through an examination of Balinese literature that while Westerners can be disruptive, and need to be kept at a cultural distance, they are still objects of desire in Balinese perceptions (Hitchcock and Darma Putra 2007). Again, it was Balinese artists, such as I Made Budi of Batuan, who rendered these perceptions into playful images of Westerners being arrested for drug use on Kuta Beach, alongside such practices as surfing and other exotic practices that these foreigners had brought.

In other parts of Indonesia, and indeed of Southeast Asia, there were attempts to control the negative influences of Hippies by controlling their appearance, notably preventing the wearing of revealing clothing, and famously, in Singapore, cutting men’s long hair on arrival at the airport. More recently, generalized Western influence has been blamed for homosexuality (see “Fahira Idris” 2016), drug use, and adultery, as if these things did not exist before modern times. The link between appearance and behavior is intriguing, since it also underlies Muslim attempts to enforce morality through dress and other visual codes.

As in Bali, so in other parts of Indonesia, the disruptive and potentially dangerous presence of Westerners in the midst of society was something that governments needed to monitor and control. I remember an episode of Indonesia’s top television puppet show, Si Unyil, from the 1980s, shown then on what was the only television channel, the government’s TVRI (Kitley 1999). In this episode, set in a remote village (probably on Java, although this is not stated), the eponymous young hero and his friends meet with some Westerners, with whom they cannot communicate (although they make “wis-wis-wis” sounds, since this is what English sounds like). They take, however, appropriate action, and report the presence of foreigners to the village head, Pak Lurah. The message of “the authorities” keeping control was a typical New Order one, and in this case the foreigners were not really dangerous, just potentially so.

Strong nationalism required an enemy in struggles for independence. Anthropologist James T. Siegel’s brilliant analysis of texts concerned with the Indonesian Revolution shows how fetishisation of the foreign helped to produce a unique stream of modernity in Indonesia. As in the cases discussed later, this sense of foreigners, at least Western ones, is that they embody a seductive desire and are the source of suspicion, and that resolving these contradictory forces necessitated the violence of the Revolution of 1945 to 1949 (Siegel 1997: 183–230). Siegel’s argument infers that Sukarno’s subsequent radical actions in the Irian campaign and Konfrontasi (Confrontation) were continuations of this same attitude to the West, remembering that these campaigns included the burning of Elvis records as part of opposition to the Nekolim (Neo-Colonials) and the OLFOS (Old Forces, i.e. the imperial Western powers). In these cases, the idea of embodying “Revolusi” was more important than negative representations of a colonial other, and in fact, Konfrontasi, one of the most virulent campaigns of the Sukarno era, was more directed against Malaysians as tools of Neokolim.

Siegel (1997: 225) sees communism as embodying this ambivalent foreignness, which is at once seductive and devouring. The sado-masochistic demonization of members of the Indonesian Women’s Movement, Gerwani as part of the anticommunist massacres of 1965 to 1969, reinforces such an argument (Wieringa 2002). The Suharto regime embraced anticommunism as a point of legitimation. Anticommunist paranoia survives to this day, as shown in the example at the opening of this chapter. However, it is not always taken seriously. An ironic update of the argument can be found in a commentary on a defense of the Muslim political party, Partai Kesejahteran Sosial, related to the Muslim Brotherhood in its outlook. In this piece, the author of the satiric comments, Windhu Jusuf (2015), takes issue with one of the many writers about the destruction of the mosque in Papua, who blamed the calamity on communists. The Communist Party of Indonesia, says Jusuf, was a tool of the Chinese communists, whereas Muslim bodies were concerned with defending Muslims, such as the oppressed Palestinians. Jusuf cleverly shows just how the link between anticommunism and antiforeign sentiment was established by the New Order regime of authoritarian president Suharto, a connection continued by Muslim politicians as a tool to establish hegemony.

In the 1980s, Indonesian nationalism was relatively weak. Suharto’s authoritarianism primarily identified internal enemies like communism as the threat, with the foreign connection and the corrupting influence of outsiders such as Hippies being a secondary issue. By the third decade of the General’s rule, the thinness of the propaganda began to show. During the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence, discussions of nationalism tended toward a veiled questioning of Suharto’s control and the lack of real independence, including personal liberties. If Indonesia had achieved sovereignty, people argued, why were Indonesians not free? (Vickers and Fisher 1999). State manipulation was subject to the limits of social action.

The weakness of nationalism at that time may also explain why there has been no marked anti-Dutch sentiment in recent decades. When I first visited Indonesia, older men, especially those who had been part of the Revolution, had strong feelings against the Dutch because they were the enemy during the struggle. These same old men remembered Sukarno’s anti-imperial rhetoric, and were brought up on the propaganda of resistance. Suharto deliberately downplayed the sense of struggle, proclaiming that what Indonesia had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Tracking the Affective Twists of Nationalisms in Asia
• Part I THE DIALECTICS OF LOVE AND HATE
• Part II PRECARIOUS BELONGINGS
• Part III AFFECTED SELVES
• Part IV THE SPECTER OF CHINA
• Index
• About the Authors