Description

The Night Letters (Surat-Surat Malam) by the artist Nashar (1928-1994) inspire a revisionist intellectual and cultural history of Indonesia between 1968 and 1977. This is a period that followed the state-sponsored mass murder of as many as one million communist party members and the imprisonment of many more, including leading artists and intellectuals. Scholars have seen these years as counter-revolutionary and lacking romance, the prelude to thirty years of repressive right-wing military dictatorship under Soeharto and a time of collaborationist intellectuals and apolitical artists. But this was not (entirely) the case. The early years of the Soeharto era were an ambiguous time when it was in no way clear what direction state and society would take. There was hope for a moralistic “New Order” in Indonesia, excitement at the reengagement with the West after a period of isolationist politics, and suppressed horror at the killings and arrests. Through the Night Letters Nashar engaged publicly, if obliquely, with the horror of 1965 and 1966. He figures and critiques the manipulations and reconstructions of history that would become a hallmark of the Soeharto state. Nashar represents the possibility of a new intellectual and cultural history of the early Soeharto years.

Jeffrey Hadler first lived with a Minangkabau family as a high school exchange student in 1985. He studied comparative literature and Southeast Asia as an undergraduate at Yale and then Southeast Asian History as a graduate student at Cornell. He taught at the State Islamic University in Jakarta in 2000 before joining the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, where he is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies. His book Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism won the 2011 Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.