356. Middle Classes in Late-Colonial Java: Revisiting the Ancestors of a Future Nation

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, Indonesia’s nascent middle-classes became increasingly central to the maintenance of colonial rule. This interdisciplinary panel explores the new lifestyles, consumption patterns, and mass culture of this group. We approach Indonesian middle classes as a poorly understood “ethnicity”. They have long been excluded from the historical record, which prioritized dominant colonial categories (“peasants”, “aristocrats”, “Chinese”) and – in post-independence times – nationalists. As a result, their crucial role within the colonial system remains largely invisible.

In redressing this imbalance, Henk Schulte Nordholt examines the visuality of Java’s new mass culture as reflected in advertisements published around the 1930s, which served to help shape “modern”, urban lifestyles. Tom Hoogervorst focuses on the written heritage of this period and demonstrates that vernacular Malay became the pre-eminent vehicle to articulate modernity. A concomitant development was the proliferation of fairs, in which the colonized became – simultaneously – the main participants and observers of the colonial project. Arnout van der Meer examines the character of these fairs as sites of legitimization of Dutch rule.

The fairs, visual culture and Malay-language literature foregrounded in this panel cannot be seen in disjunction from Indonesia’s emerging middle classes. To appreciate their historical importance and continuities with contemporary Indonesia, we turn our attention to the ambitions, anxieties, and desires of this oft-overlooked group.

Area of Study

• Southeast

Session Organizer

• Tom Gunnar Hoogervorst, KITLV

Chair

• Henk Schulte Schulte Nordholt, KITLV - Leiden

Individual Presentations

• Mass Culture, Modernity, Visuality: The Emergence of New Urban Middle Classes in the Netherlands Indies - Henk Schulte Schulte Nordholt, KITLV - Leiden

• Unauthentic, Vulgar, Forgotten: Reappreciating Vernacular Malay Literature - Tom Gunnar Hoogervorst, KITLV

• A Performance in Contrasts: Fairs, Commodities, and the Production of Difference - Arnout H.C. van der Meer, Colby College

Discussant

• Nurfadzilah Yahaya, National University of Singapore