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In the aftermath of Soeharto’s 32-year dictatorship (1966-1998), Indonesia has experienced an outpouring of testimony concerning the violence and terror that marked his regime. Yet the ongoing reluctance of post-Soeharto leaders to address past human rights abuses has led a number of international observers to describe transitional justice as having “failed” or been “derailed” in Indonesia. In this paper, I seek to bring concerns with narrative and political subjectivity to bear on discussions of the “failure” of transitional justice in Indonesia, arguing for greater attention to the politics of speech and emotion that have constrained the witnessing subject.
Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research with survivors of mass violence in Bali, I ask what it means to speak as a witness to atrocities, highlighting the deep ambivalence of the subject who is exhorted to speak in the register of the tragic, positioned and interpolated by new human rights languages whose affective politics demand the silencing of vital modes of experience. Drawing on Agamben’s (1999) articulation of testimony as the bearing witness to the unspeakable, on Balinese conceptions of aje were as a prohibition of dangerous speech, and on feminist critiques of the gendered limits of emotion demanded of the juridical witness to sexualized terror, I conclude by asking what new forms of Indonesian subjectivity may be emerging to give voice to both past and present violence.