Abstract

Halting Progress: Meanings of Kemadjoean in Adinegoro’s Asmara Djaja

by

Shawn Easton Callanan

Doctor of Philosophy in Southeast Asian Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Sylvia Tiwon, Chair

“Kemadjoean” (“progress”) is a key concept in the thinking of the early twentieth century Indonesian writer Adinegoro, particularly in his 1928 novel Asmara Djaja. Kemadjoean is a metaphor of forward movement and implies change. This study aims to explore the effects of kemadjoean as depicted in this novel. To explore the claim of this dissertation, that kemadjoean, despite being a metaphor connoting change and movement, actually inhibits development and begets stasis, I analyze a number of passages in the text via close reading, and in the light of other relevant writings, in order to better understand the implicit and explicit meanings of those passages. In Chapter One, I show how the increasing proliferation of written language and other representations depicted in Asmara Djaja, in the form of handwritten letters, telegrams, newspapers, typewritten letters, and the like, can accentuate the stasis-producing effects of kemadjoean. In Chapter Two, I explore how the increasing bufferedness of interpersonal relationships within kemadjoean can fortify kemadjoean’s stilling effects. One of the most powerful means to bring about this attenuation of relationships is simple physical distance of people from one another, whether that be facilitated by steamships, telegrams, or other technologies. In Chapter Three, I write about the powerful universalizing tendencies of kemadjoean. Associated with this universalization are the prevalence of clock time and clocks that regulate characters’ lives in the novel, and the increasingly anthropologically-inflected ways in which characters at this time are now understanding and explaining their world. In Chapter Four, I discuss the role of the Malay language in kemadjoean. Malay is depicted as a central language, in that it is metaphorically located between its linguistic neighbors, and positioned as the most appropriate linguistic medium, and the one able to best translate and signify for the community Adinegoro portrays in his novel. These readings show the various ways that kemadjoean creates stasis, problematizing the implicit claims inherent in a metaphor of movement, and complicating commonly accepted understandings of kemadjoean. In so doing, these readings help us to better understand some of the forces that shape the context in which this novel was written, and that influence Indonesian writing, language, and life to this day.

This book is a collection of essays in Indonesian history and archaeology dealing with different and multiple trajectories, along four broad themes. The first part of the book covers competing or evolving representations of events, customs or traditions, and historical personae in Indonesian official and popular expression, as they are shaped by economic, political, and cultural forces. The second part deals with memories of war and peace, examining transnational conflict and collaboration, the role of political elites and state projects dealing with the aftermath of military aggression, while also focusing on the impact and responses of civilians. The third part focuses on how state and civil societies frame historical figures, in ways that transcend the dichotomy of heroes and victims. The fourth part of the book looks at the way Indonesian museums and museology serve as sites where new kinds of memory work occur, in a post-1998 era.

The book is designed with the aim ofclearing a space for a plurality of memory works. Discussions in this volume extend from Loloda island in Eastern Indonesia, to Sabang island at the north westernmost end of the archipelago, and to the cosmopolitan centers. Temporally, it covers the colonial, the post-independence and contemporary eras. By juxtaposing diverse works, the book offers a new vista of multiple trajectories of memory being traced out in and about Indonesia.

The dissertation unravels how the indigenous transgender identity of the bissu experiences reconfigurations within the Indonesian modern culture dominated by Islamic heterosexual norm. Based on the data collected from the field research in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, archival research in the Netherlands, and media research, the dissertation traces the inflections of bissu identity at the intersection between local traditions and the emergent modern spectator community, artistic experimentation, global culture industry, and homosexual movement in the aftermath of Suharto’s fall in 1998. Within this multicultural network, the indigenous identity of the bissu constitutes a paradox in which the convergence between the bissu traditional practices and modern artistic practices transcends the bissu’s distinct transgender position from its local reality and engenders a discursive and social space that allows the bissu to overcome the constraint of Islamic heterosexual norm and to provide a cultural and historical register for the urban transgender groups to claim their local cultural root. The location of the bissu indigeneity and transgender identity lies within the dynamic interactions among the bissu, the state, and culture industry, in which moral sentiments and aesthetic sensibility emerge in their distinct forms. The research poses a critique against the failure of the mainstream narratives to address the emerging moral space the bissu inhabit. The space, which I call a spiritual aesthetic space, contains disparate religious and cultural elements as the bissu unite three strands of identity: transgender, Islamic, and indigenous.

This research explores symbolic action and the intergenerational imagination in transformative social movements in Indonesia. Two community-based schools located in Central Java, Indonesia—Sanggar Anak Alam (SALAM, the Nature Childrens’ Studio) and Komunitas Belajar Qaryah Thayyibah (KBQT, the Learning Community for Village Empowerment)—form the grounds for this study. Scholarship on social movements in Indonesia often views cultural resistance as determined by large-scale acts of protest through the actions of high-profile figures in predominantly urban sites. In the context of 20th century activism against the authoritarianism of the New Order state (1965-1998), the strength of cultural hegemony of the time made it so that these kinds of movements were easily suppressed due to their public staging and internal fragmentation. In this project, I explore movements that are not often represented in scholarship. The community schools of SALAM and KBQT also began as counter-movements to the New Order hegemony but grew out of small-scale negotiations among a diverse set of actors at the interface between rural and urban experience in Java. As they continue to organize today, what actions contributes to the sustained movements of these communities? How do they effect transformative change? I investigate these questions through creative productions by members of SALAM and KBQT: works of literature and performance arts gathered from fieldwork conducted in Indonesia in 2015, combined with oral histories, as well as my own participation within these schools. This dissertation makes several contributions to existing social movement scholarship in Indonesia. First, it demonstrates how change takes place over long periods of time, through processual steps constituted by intergenerational communities. Second, the efficacy of transformative social movement action is shown to be contingent upon participation by a multiplicity of decentralized actors. Third, as action itself is distributed more widely, cultural resistance is transformed into cultural resilience through symbolic actions. This work reflects the ways in which the community schools of SALAM and KBQT sustain movements of transformation. By drawing from the ways in which they situate symbolic actions within intergenerational communities at the rural-urban interface in Java, this research shows how new imaginations of transformative change are constituted in scholarship and in Indonesian social movements.

This dissertation examines the work of modern and contemporary artists associated with the Minangkabau ethnic group. Today, this group is roughly synonymous with the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. It is also recognized as the world’s largest matrilineal Muslim society. Throughout history because men had no right to immovable property, this contributed to a propensity for outward migration (merantau) and shaped what is imagined as the Minangkabau world (alam Minangkabau). This multi-sited world that is constituted by a homeland and diaspora and is shaped by factors like its members’ association with Minangkabau history, culture, and language rather than fixed geographic boundaries is the focus of this study that spans the late-colonial era (c. 1900) to the present.

My focus is on artists from Minangkabau because they occupy a double place in Indonesian modern and contemporary art historiography. Not only do artists from Minangkabau hold roles as national pioneers who are credited with achieving successes in the name of Indonesia but also, the work of artists from Minangkabau has consistently been recognized because of how it diverges from dominant streams of expression. Until recently, little attention was paid to what might have contributed to such trends. In this dissertation I show that thanks to the commercial success of certain artists from Minangkabau along with the growth of two artist communities that are part of the Minangkabau diaspora in Java, there is now a greater coherence around Minangkabau identity in art. This makes it possible to trace a history of visual expression specific to Minangkabau that demonstrates a unique relationship to nature and ecosystems and is inseparable from Minangkabau customary norms (adat).

This dissertation makes three broad contributions. First, it engages with a history of art making associated with the work of modern and contemporary artists in and from Minangkabau. To date, writing on Indonesian art history has centered on the island of Java. This is because the nation’s preeminent art schools are located there along with the greatest concentration of artists. Second, by focusing on how merantau has shaped the careers of artists associated with Minangkabau and contributed to what I contend is a contemporary Minangkabau art world, it highlights the ways that historical modes of world-making challenge prescriptive constructures like the nation-state and politicized ideas of regional cohesion. Third, through an engagement with adat and alam (nature, universe, and realms of perception), it contributes to scholarship that is focused on decolonizing the Anthropocene by foregrounding local or non-Western bodies of knowledge.