At no time has there been more fascination with the contrast that memories of colonialism afford between the "elegance" of domination and the brutality of its effects. 1 While images of empire surface and resurface in the public domain, colonial studies has materialized over the last decade as a force of cultural critique, political commentary, and not least as a domain of new expert knowledge. One could argue that the entire field has positioned itself as a counterweight to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the post-World War II period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and a film industry that encourages "even politically progressive [North American] audiences" to enjoy "the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races." 2 Still, Nietzsche's warning against "idle cultivation of the garden of history" resonates today when it is not always clear whether some engagements with the colonial are raking up colonial ground, or vicariously luxuriating in it. 3 From the vantage point of the postcolonial, the notion of a "history of the present" has strong resonance and appeal. Colonial architecture, memorials, archives and the scientific disciplines that flourished under the guidance of colonial institutions are dissected as technologies of rule whose "legacies" and "influences" are embodied in our comportments and leisures, lodged in our everyday accoutrements and embedded in the habitus of the present. The remembrance of past colonial relations of power has emerged as fundamental to a range of postcolonial intellectual and political agendas that make the recording, rewriting and eliciting of colonial memories so pertinent and charged. Yet what remains surprisingly absent from ethnographic histories written "from the bottom up" and elite histories viewed upside down is an explicit engagement with the nature of colonial memories-not only with what is remembered and why, but with how the specifically "colonial" is situated in popular memory at all. Our work rests on a relatively simple but disconcerting observation: namely that "the colonial" is invoked with such certitude of its effects by those studying it, and "colonial memory" with such assuredness of its ever-presence, that both are treated as known and knowable quantities, rather than as problematic sites of query in themselves.

In the period of transition following Suharto's resignation as president of Indonesia in 1998, the image of the 50,000Rp bill bearing his face became a visual shorthand for the corruption and abuse of power that had characterized his regime. Accessible, decentralized consumer technologies enabled people to alter money's appearance, transforming it from a fetish of the state into a malleable surface available for popular reinscription. As the medium of money was “remediated”—absorbed into other media, refashioned, and circulated along new pathways—it became a means by which people engaged questions of state power, national integrity, political authenticity, and economic relations opened up by the crisis of Reformasi (Reform). The essay argues that remediations of public forms play a crucial role in times of political transition by enabling people to materialize alternative visions of political authority and authenticity. Moreover, remediated forms have become a characteristic modality of political communication in the post‐Suharto period under conditions of democratization and an increasingly diversified media ecology.

How does the seen produce the unseen? And what happens when the unseen makes a bid to emerge from its occlusion? This paper examines the gendered visuality of the Reformasi crisis in Indonesia in 1998, juxtaposing the visibility of male‐on‐male violence at student demonstrations with the invisibility of violence against (feminised) Chinese‐Indonesians and, in particular, raped Chinese‐Indonesian women. The discussion focuses on activists’ attempts to establish ‘proof’ that these rapes did occur, government attempts to discredit their evidence, and the circulation of false photographs of the rapes on the internet. (An unremarked irony of this falsification of evidence was that it was made possible by the pre‐existence of an archive of sexually violent images on pornographic sites depicting ‘Asian schoolgirls’.) The paper argues that this particular debate over credibility, witnessing and proof needs to be seen within a wider popular Indonesian discourse on the status of evidence, the privileged place of the photograph within it, and the archive of images of (male) students and heroic male‐on‐male violence that helped shape what people could ‘see’ as meaningful political action and recognisable state violence. It also comments on the evidentiary status of witnessing and embodied experience in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction.

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