Performing National Identity in Postcolonial Indonesia

Abstract

Since the first independence movements began in the early twentieth century Dutch East Indies, much energy has been devoted to the development of an Indonesian identity that both differentiates the new nation from its colonizers and links people separated by geography, history, ethnicity, language and class. Such national self-imagining is commonly articulated spatially through state designed or designated landscape and through the performances of national identity by its citizenry. Through an examination of work, education and play, this thesis broadly seeks to understand the spatiality of performance and explore the relationship between landscape and the performance of national identity. My research is focused around three main objectives. First, I seek to understand the role of performance in the formation, dissemination, and enforcement of official national identity in postcolonial Indonesia. More specifically, I intend to analyze how the national landscape functions as a cultural practice and expose the strategies employed by the state to encourage citizens to perform various identities within the context of power relationships embedded in national landscapes. Second, I intend to examine the ways in which performances of national identity have and have not changed over the course of the Old Order and New Order and into the present. Third, I will explore how national identities are understood, accepted, resisted and reinterpreted by the citizenry in complex and often conflicting ways on a range of scales and locations.