Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order' Java

Abstract

At no time has there been more fascination with the contrast that memories of colonialism afford between the “elegance” of domination and the brutality of its effects.Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” in Culture and Truth, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 68. While images of empire surface and resurface in the public domain, colonial studies has materialized over the last decade as a force of cultural critique, political commentary, and not least as a domain of new expert knowledge. One could argue that the entire field has positioned itself as a counterweight to the waves of colonial nostalgia that have emerged in the post-World War II period in personal memoirs, coffee table books, tropical chic couture, and a film industry that encourages “even politically progressive [North American] audiences” to enjoy “the elegance of manners governing relations of dominance and subordination between the races.”Ibid. Still, Nietzsche's warning against “idle cultivation of the garden of history” resonates today when it is not always clear whether some engagements with the colonial are raking up colonial ground, or vicariously luxuriating in it.Freidrich Nietzsche, “The Uses and Advantages of History,” Untimely Meditations, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996[1874]), 68.