Description
Book SynopsisPerforming 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 administrat
Trade Review
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 *
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 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: 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
