International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

For much of the last century, anxiety about the direction of Indonesian society—its entry into “the new times” of the 20th century—has been reflected in the built landscape of this populous and diverse nation. In APPEARANCES OF MEMORY Abidin Kusno examines a range of architectural and spatial features produced in Indonesia from the late colonial period to the period following the fall of the Suharto regime. He studies the role of these features in helping both to constitute new social and political identities and to reinforce old hierarchies among Indonesia’s citizens. Kusno finds in the Indonesian built environment an echo of the voices of radical youth (both contemporary and historical), conservative elites, “revolutionary wonderers,” religious leaders, literary figures, visionary architects, and the social reformers who have shaped the nation’s history. Kusno tries to answer the following questions: How do architecture and the urban environment help shape social memories and political consciousness in the colonial and postcolonial worlds? How do different members of society copes with troubling memories of the past? And how do they contest forms of historical experience inscribed in the city.

Kusno’s attention moves between contemporary Indonesia and the Indonesia of the Dutch colonial empire. The author looks at Jakarta’s new bus transportation system as reflecting an effort by the state to mediate citizens’ imaging of a passage to a new era, and as an opportunity to reintegrate Indonesians into the city’s urban space and foster their imagery of national progress. He then looks at housing—both the private house and the “superblock,” that is, a large structure containing residences, offices, entertainment venues, and stores—showing how the city’s efforts to evict squatters and reclaim public spaces rely on political symbolism to encourage urbanism over suburbanism. Issues around memory, violence, and urban renewal are next considered by analyzing the architectural reconstruction of “Glodok,” a key Chinese business district in Jakarta that was heavily damaged in the 1998 anti-Chinese riots. The reconstruction ironically recalls the trauma by inadequately representing it. Moving back to the period of Suharto’s New Order, Kusno shows how architectural styles of Dutch colonial society—neo-Classical, regionalist Indies, and modernist art deco—are refashioned by architects and their clients to work both with and against the grain of the state’s interests. Later chapters consider the images and drawings of urban designers of late colonial Indonesia (1927-42) and their attempts to evoke yet another new time and new space; the effects on social spaces exerted by the anti-colonial nationalist Tan Malaka; and mosques and gatehouses as a response to the global architectural flows of Islam and their role in the making of the new times.