Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order' Java

Abstract

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.

Traveling Stories, Colonial Intimacies, and Women's Histories in Vanuatu

“…Ann Stoler has argued that "who could be intimate with whom-and in what way-[was] a primary concern in colonial policy" (2002,2). Her work, which focuses on colonial policy and archival material, with some interviews of ex-colonial house servants, portrays colonial domesticity as a highly contested site (see Stoler 1991Stoler , 2002Stoler and Strassler 2000). It seems tailor-made as a framework for understanding-though not reconciling-the inconsistencies, points of contradiction, and uncertainties in the linked stories I present here.…”

‘When I hear Afrikaans in the classroom and never my language, I get rebellious’: linguistic apartheid in South African higher education

“…Indeed, oral histories are 'made' -both by the interviewees and the interviewer. As Stoler and Strassler (2000) contend, participants' recollections, frames, and voices rest upon their own conceptions of identity and performance of self, since: 'memories are not "stored" truths but constructions . .…”

How It Was/Is Told, Recorded and Remembered: The Discontinued History of the Third Front Construction

“…Firstly, I do not treat oral testimonies "simply as a series of given facts, to be discovered and described," 45 but rather as "the conscious and unconscious meanings of experience as lived and remembered." 46 That is to say, I regard workers' oral testimonies as "problematic sites of query in themselves," 47 and, hence, focus not only on what is remembered, but also on how and why. Secondly, I also question the optimistic assumption that oral history will always challenge the hegemonic discourses.…”

“…" 53 Here, workers have actively re-worked the socialist hegemonic discourses (that they also internalized and identified with), made them part of their remembered life experiences, and used them as weapons against the contemporary hegemonic historiography and reforming policies. But they have done so in ways that also make them quite vulnerable.…”