“Let Us Become Radio Mechanics”: Technology and National Identity in Late-Colonial Netherlands East Indies

Abstract

THE METAPHOR

In 1900, twenty-one-year-old Raden Adjeng Kartini, who liked best to think of herself as a young wild horse, a daughter of the Javanese regent of Japara, a woman who after her death became an anointed “mother of Indonesian nationalism, ” wrote to a friend, Henri van Kol, a Dutch parliamentarian and European socialist expert on colonialism that “it would seem as though an invisible telephone cable ran from here to Lali Djiwa and back again.”Raden Adjeng Kartini, Letters of a Javanese Princess (New York: W. W. Morton, 1964), 190. By “here,” Kartini meant her father's palace on the north coast of the Netherlands East Indies' main island; Lali Djiwa was van Kol's residence in Prinsenhage in Holland. A few months earlier, Kartini had written to another friend, a Dutch feminist who worked at the city post office in Amsterdam, describing the closeness she felt between herself and her father — as if “a wire” connected their hearts.H. Bouman, Meer licht over Kartini (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1954). It was the opening of a new century, and Kartini's mode of expression reflected what seemed to be a distinct mood of the time. Hers appeared to be a good case of what Søren Kierkegaard once defined as “enthusiasm of imagination,” a nostalgia for the mythical, a stepping “forth in a new form, that is, as a metaphor.”Kierkegaard's explanation of his and Hegel's view of metaphor in The Concept of Irony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 101–3.