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Mass Culture, Modernity, Visuality: The Emergence of New Urban Middle Classes in the Netherlands Indies

Sun, March 19, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, Roosevelt

Abstract

At the start of the 20th century, emerging middle classes in colonial Indonesia adopted a new mass culture. The visuality of this new mass culture is reflected in advertisements which helped to shape new lifestyles. These middle classes were for a long time excluded from the historical record because their existence was on the one hand marginalized by dominant colonial categories like “peasants”, “aristocrats”, “Chinese”, and on the other by an exclusive focus on the role of nationalists who monopolized the historiography of the new nation state. As a result one failed to see the crucial role of these middle classes within the colonial system. They were the children of the colonial state and for that matter the ancestors of a future Indonesia.

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