Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2016. xvi, 278 pp. (Illustrations.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6171-8.
The term pemuda (youth) was both cherished and feared at one major point in Indonesian history. The Suharto regime (1966–1998) recognized the determinacy of pemuda, as the term first emerged in public consciousness in the early twentieth century in reference to a nationalist “oath” for unification. Pemuda however only gained its power when it was militarized during Japanese occupation for war mobilization. The term became popular in the time of revolution. The revolutionary connotation of pemuda was considered unsuitable for a post-Independence regime seeking order and stability. To domesticate pemuda the ruling elite invented the term remaja (a term associated with mama’s teenager) for Indonesian youth. All through the Suharto era, remaja was popularized throughout popular culture, even constituting a significant genre in the New Order’s film industry. Since the appearance of remaja, pemuda was confined to past heroism, frozen as a street name in Surabaya, Yogyakarta, and Medan (and perhaps some other secondary cities), but not in Jakarta. Pemuda, despite its critical role in fighting for Indonesian independence, was considered dead (much like the national heroes) by the New Order that sought to build a new legacy of its own.
In Activist Archives, Doreen Lee challenges us to think of pemuda not as a part of the historical past, but as a living “other” exiled within the national archive. She retrieves the political past of pemuda by returning them to the 1980s-1990s as undercurrents haunting the remaja era and beyond. The book thus is organized around the political lives of activist youth represented as neither round nor linear. Lee portrays their lives as always already linked to some moments of the past, “moving back and forth between 1998 and other experiences” (108), with their subjectivities located in space moving discursively between home and homelessness. Why this is so has to do with the state’s suppression of its own violence, which in turn has produced an archive that seeks to exclude activists. Such otherness felt among the activists, no matter how equipped they are in their activism, has the subtler consequence of a difficulty in grasping their own contexts of production and activity.
It is in this context that Lee’s work is truly fascinating and challenging. She seeks to bring back, via a route of history and anthropology, the figure of pemuda now in the form of “activists.” But the route taken is far from straightforward as both the field and the archive are not always locatable, ready to be observed and narrated. The activist youth exist—and this to me is the most important contribution of the book—in multiple forms and engage us in many different ways, both concrete and imaginative: as environment (street, camps, posts, and home), image (art, film, and photography), artifact (t-shirts, banners, and cellphones) and discourses (of trauma, democracy, and emergency). For Lee, archive is shaped not so much by what it says, but by where it is located. She had to follow the discursive and often ephemeral paths of activists to grasp their excluded or exiled archive. Such an approach to archive is groundbreaking.
Throughout the book, Lee finds inspiration in a range of critical theories, from those of Giorgio Agamben to Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin. She has also brought to life the best of Cornell’s Indonesian scholarship characterized by rich ethnographic and historical materials, and perhaps most importantly, a strong sense of political engagement (although she never quite felt at home at Cornell, the “mecca of Southeast Asian Studies”). A most interesting part concerns Lee’s own subjectivity, and how she relates to her study, her field, and her Indonesia. “What I did when I was there” is more than a methodological report of a scholar standing from a position of an observer. It concerns “another story” about her embedded-ness in space and time (for Lee too belongs to Generation 98—no matter what this might mean). This has made her aware of her own class, ethnic, and gender backgrounds and what it means to live through (together and apart) an important chapter of Indonesian history, of 1998, before and after. Beneath this scholarship thus is a work of redemptive imagination of who constitutes the Generation 98 activists after years of suppression and misunderstanding, how they came to be, and what they have done, and perhaps more urgently, what they mean for today’s youth.
This book is also timely as its publication comes at the time when the streets of Jakarta are experiencing a war between the ghosts of different pasts, with each claiming to represent post-Reformasi activism. And yet the rallies and protests on the streets are energies with sources not necessarily in activists. Meanwhile, much of what is happening today is also inseparable from the technology of the virtual world, such as social media, which constitutes faceless groups. Discourses too have also shifted from human rights and democracy to the subject of religion, with Islam and the politics of morality at the forefront of activism. Lee sees some of these coming in her concluding chapter, but they seem to be beyond the reach of Generation 98—thus beyond the stretch of her book. Such a limit however is also the strength of the book, so Activist Archives can be called a definitive work that will be prized as perhaps the best “biography” of a generation of Indonesian urban activism.
Abidin Kusno
York University, Toronto, Canada
pp. 626-628