Ana Dragojlovic

Dutch Women and Balinese Men: Intimacies, Popular Discourses and Citizenship Rights

The present article looks how intimate liaisons between Dutch women and Balinese men are intertwined in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways in regard to class position, gender ideologies and immigration policy in the contemporary Netherlands. Central to this analysis is a dialogue between Dutch women, their Balinese partners and popular discourse about Dutch women who marry ‘the other men’. I examine how citizenship regulations that play a significant role in interfamilial relations of interdependency form complex gender dynamics, and how Dutch womens rhetoric about the emancipation of Dutch women and desire for a companionate marriage tend to collide with the practices of everyday life. I argue that gender ideologies in these cross-cultural liaisons are conceptualised and reconceptualised in relation to ‘gender imaginings’. I suggest that the ideals of companionate marriage, favoured by Dutch women, are linked directly to ideals of modernity and individualism, in which particular scripts of gender relations are used to differentiate progressive individuals from those who are not.

Reframing the nation: migration, borders and belonging

Almost a decade ago, theorists of globalisation were announcing the impeding demise of the nation-state (Hannerz 1996; Appadurai 1999). Since then, we have been witnessing renewed emphasis on borders and exclusion while nation-state discourses on security have become more vocal as a consequence of the attacks in North America, particularly 9/11 (in 2001) and subsequent attacks in Western Europe and southeast Asia. However, these developments have not reduced the high level of mobility in the contemporary world. The beginning of the twenty-first century can be characterised as a transnational age, discerned by the high level of mobility, in which questions of identity and citizenship become crucial because mobile subjects can simultaneously question the legitimacy of the nation-state while reinforcing its capability to endow rights. The concept of transnationalism circulates widely as a useful term for rethinking migration and belonging at the present time. The two most influential approaches to transnationalism are those developed by Appadurai (1999) and Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blane (1994). The latter has an anthropological take on labour migration as a transnational process (Basch et al. 1994) and delineates it as a social field created by people who live their lives in more than one nation. In this way, attention is drawn to the agency of ordinary individuals in these global processes. However, this approach does not entirely capture the ways in which the transnational circulation of ideas, and capital, shape the lives of people who seem less mobile (Lim 2008). The formulation of transnationalism as ‘transnational flow’ was advanced by Ajrun Appadurai (1999) and Ulf Hannerz (1996). This approach to transnationalism, which sometimes ignores inequalities, is largely concerned with flows of capital, technology and communication networks. This approach also argues that the rise of transnational connections is causing a decline in the importance of the nation-state in the current phase of globalisation. A related ‘borderless world’ argument advocates for the importance of cultures over nation-states, suggesting that identities are more

Haunted by ‘Miscegenation’: Gender, the White Australia Policy and the Construction of Indisch Family Narratives

This paper traces complex negotiations of multiraciality in the context of transgenerational genealogy work in the wake of historical violence, genocide and colonialism. Basing the analysis on detailed ethnographic material about Indonesian-Dutch (Indisch) genealogy and memory work, I explore how the regulation of ‘races’ [sic] during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies and under the White Australia Policy employed genealogical charts to determine freedom from imprisonment and/or rights to full citizenship for Indisch individuals, and how these feature in the genealogy work of the children and grandchildren of those subjected to racial regulatory norms. Centring the analysis on a specific family history writing project, I demonstrate how such a project is haunted by the ghostly figures of historical ‘miscegenation’ – the Indonesian foremother, and the white woman who crosses lines of respectable white femininity by marrying an Indisch man. The paper explores how narrative strategies of exclusion are used differently across generations as a way of dealing with feelings of shame, guilt and secrecy produced by institutionalised racism, historical violence and imperialism. The paper argues that genealogy work operates not only as a vehicle for self-exploration and belonging for transnational families of historical diaspora, but is also central for the collective identity formation and the production of Indisch peoplehood.

The Search for Sensuous Geographies of Absence: Indisch Mediation of Loss

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland engage with geographies of loss, and how travel serves as an active process of mediation. My focus is on Indies (Indonesian-Dutch) migrants and their descendants living in the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic material I explore how migrants’ descendants associate colonial times and ancestral homelands with narrative strategies of exclusion and containment and tempo doeloe discourses (a nostalgic longing for the ‘good old days’) as generative of a collective victimhood. I seek to unravel how descendants explore agentic modalities of travel in order to reactivate, re-embody, and thus intervene in their families’ and collective histories. The article analyses how affective experiences of places of and far beyond the geographical locations of the Dutch East Indies have a potential to invigorate embodied Indies sensibilities. Thus, I write towards a theory of intergenerational transmission and felt dispositions in relation to old, multiracial diasporas such as the Indies. I argue that searches for sensuous geographies of absence are a specific modality of genealogy work that serves as a vehicle through which to move across and among different times in order to destabilize postcolonial temporalities.

Materiality, loss and redemptive hope in the Indonesian leftist diaspora

This article explores how notions of loss and absence are constituted through Indonesian eksil (exile) life narratives including their development of private collections of leftist literature, personal diaries, obituaries and personal documents, in order to explore the inter-relational aspects of materiality, acts of mourning and their place in the memorialisation of the left in diaspora. I suggest that both the acts of collecting and the individual narratives of failure, loss and absence have unifying effects and act as different agentic modalities that work towards redemptive hope for the future.

Did you know my Father? The Zone of Unspeakability as Postcolonial Legacy

Abstract Through a detailed ethnographic account of an Indisch woman born in the former Dutch East Indies but living in the contemporary Netherlands, this paper explores the convoluted relationships between trauma caused by war, sexual violence, gender normativity and family relationships. It examines how traumatic knowledge about biological kin becomes a point of reconfiguration of the self, present social relations and the wider world. Following up on scholarship that stresses the importance of engaging with everyday manifestations of trauma caused by past violence, in order to understand the multifaceted expressions of social suffering (Das and Kleinman 1997, 2001), this paper explores how subjectivities are formed and refashioned through an active engagement with feelings of suffering and distress. I argue that Indisch genealogical work offers the individual the opportunity to enact a lived experience of the locality, sounds and smells of the places where one was born and once lived. These experiences offer a space for the resolution of suffering and the creation of forgiveness for both the individuals and the collectivities that inflicted the violence and suffering.

‘Playing family’: unruly relationality and transnational motherhood

Scholarly literature on interpersonal relationships between tourist women and local men has been largely discussed under the heteronormative framework of love and sexuality. However, the plenitude of ways in which these intimacies manifest themselves requires that we pay attention to the manifold forms of heterosexual relatedness that these intimacies generate. This article considers how intimate liaisons between Western women and Balinese men that commenced as holiday romances in Bali transform into unruly relationality and transnational motherhood. Focusing the analysis on womens narratives, the article explores how subjects engage in the production of sexual, reproductive, social and economic forms of transnational relatedness wherein the mother and child live permanently in the womens country of citizenship while the Balinese father remains in Bali. Rather than aspiring towards a monogamous relationship and cohabitation as heteronormativity prescribes, the article demonstrates how these non-conventional, transnational families perpetually challenge the nuclear family norm, boundaries of normative motherhood and dichotomies of home versus away.

Knowing the past affectively: Screen media and the evocation of intergenerational trauma

This article explores the relationship between the affective intensities of screen media and its potential to serve as an affective force for the transmission of intergenerational trauma. I explore how watching a documentary portraying historical atrocities that preceded the birth of the documentary’s viewers yet affected their lives in profound ways, is one of the manifold engagements in genealogy and memory work that seeks to know the past affectively. My focus is on Indisch (Indonesian-Dutch) viewers whose relatives suffered through various atrocities that took place in Indonesia in the 20th century. By ethnographically exploring Indisch affective engagements with Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing (2012), I show how such engagements need to be analysed as occurring across human and non-human interactions and beyond the subject–object distinction. I argue that the affectivity of screen media (in particular, documentaries) that showcase instances of historical violence that have never received much public representation needs to be understood with particular historical contingencies. This article alerts us to how processes of getting to know the past affectively reveal the fragility of the embodied self in the wake of cataclysmic violence.

Mis-placed Boomerangs: Artistic Creativity Supply Chain Capitalism, and the Production of Ethnic Arts in Bali

Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the production, dissemination and consumption of non-Balinese and non-Indonesian ethnic arts, this paper focuses on ‘mis-placed’ boomerangs as an example of the emerging juxtaposition of different ethnic aesthetics in the Balinese art market. The ethnographic investigation provides insights into the socio-economic dynamics of art markets and reveals a complex interplay of the interlocking aspects of the performance of cultural identity associated with artistic skilfulness and efficiency of production of Balinese and other ethnic arts which leads to willing participation in ‘supply chain capitalism’. Focusing the analysis on how, where and for whom these objects might be perceived as ‘in’ or ‘out of place’, the article ponders how authentication becomes a process of constant negotiation, shifting from production of imagined cultural essentialism to reproduction of ethnic aesthetics that celebrates the juxtaposition of divergent cultures. The article contributes to debates about Balinese culture and its representation, pointing to the importance of the political and economic forces in these contestations and to the unequal power relations present not only between Balinese and international traders but also between Balinese producer-distributors and the Balinese cultural nationalists who claim authority over Balinese culture.

Violent Histories and Embodied Memories: Affectivity of “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”

This chapter analyzes the capacity of visual media to produce an affective atmosphere capable of evoking embodied memories of intergenerational experiences of historical violence. Focusing on the detailed personal narrative of an Indisch (Indo-Dutch) descendant of survivors of the 1965–1966 killings living in the Netherlands, the chapter examines how she began to confront her personal family history and their connections to 1965 only after watching The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), documentaries by Joshua Oppenheimer et al. Dragojlovic argues that the spectator—a descendant of the 1965–1966 events—is overwhelmed by the affective atmosphere of the violent past, which necessitates a re-establishment of her affective connection to the past events and its incorporation within the present.