Performing Power : : Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia / / Arnout der Meer.

• VerfasserIn: der Meer, Arnout,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (228 p.) :; 9 b&w halftones, 1 map

Performing Power illuminates how colonial dominance in Indonesia was legitimized, maintained, negotiated, and contested through the everyday staging and public performance of power between the colonizer and colonized. Van der Meer's Performing Power explores what seemingly ordinary interactions reveal about the construction of national, racial, social, religious, and gender identities as well as the experience of modernity in colonial Indonesia. Through acts of everyday resistance, such as speaking a different language, withholding deference, and changing one's appearance and consumer behavior, a new generation of Indonesians contested the hegemonic colonial appropriation of local culture, and the racial and gender inequalities that it sustained. Over time these relationships of domination and subordination became inverted, and by the 20th century the Javanese used the tropes of Dutch colonial behavior to subvert the administrative hierarchy of the state.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Spelling and Terms -- Introduction. Performance of Power -- 1. Setting the Stage: The Javanization of Colonial Authority in the Nineteenth Century -- 2. "Sweet Was the Dream, Bitter the Awakening" : Contested Implementation of the Ethical Policy, 1901-1913 -- 3. Disrupting the Colonial Performance: The Hormat Circular of 1913 and the National Awakening -- 4. Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies: From Ethnic Stereotypes to National Dress -- 5. East Is East, and West Is West: Forging Modern Identities -- 6. Staging Colonial Modernity: Hegemony, Fairs, and the Indonesian Middle Classes -- Epilogue. Pawnshops as Stages of the Colonial Performance of Power -- Notes -- Bibliography