Thursday, February 27th, 2014 Paper Regimes and Uncertain Taxonomies: Rethinking the Scope of Student Dissent at the Close of Indonesia’s New Order

Description

The recent history of Indonesia casts the events of early 1998 (economic crisis, student-led mass demonstrations, the May Riots, and the resignation of President Suharto) as an epistemic as well as a political break between the New Order regime and the reformist regimes that came after. The emergence of the student activist as the hero of the Reform era was in many ways a natural outcome and an unexpected element in the story of Indonesia’s democratisation. A central question that animates my research concerns the boundaries of dissent and the disposition of the privileged middle classes in the decade prior to the end of the New Order. How far back did student activism against the military dictatorship go, and how did privilege inform their politics? This talk draws on the first chapter of my book, and is based on the personal archives of well-known student activists collected by the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in the Netherlands. “Tickling the archive,” as Rudolf Mrazek puts it, opens up questions of public and political culture, techniques of dissent and repression, and undermines the narratology of event-based political histories. I pay attention to the material fact and form of the archive, its techniques and slippages, that reveal what Ann Stoler calls the “epistemic unease” of New Order power and authority. My reading of the archives has yielded new insights that complicate the picture of the 1980s – 1990s as a period of relatively weak, campus-based and institutionally-bound dissent; instead the “gestational” era showed significant unrest, networking, and social activism by students, intellectuals, peasants, and workers.

Doreen Lee is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. She earned her doctorate at Cornell University in Socio-cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies in 2008. She is the recipient of an IIAS fellowship from the International Institute for Asian Studies in the Netherlands, where she is currently conducting archival research and completing her book manuscript. Pemuda Fever analyses the Indonesian student movements of 1998 and their diverse political, material and visual cultures. Recent work by Dr. Lee can be found in City and Society, History and Anthropology, and Journal of Urban History.