International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

PROMENADES IN A COLONY is a study of Jakarta in the 20th century related through Rudolf Mrázek’s interviews with the city’s elderly intellectuals, who had lived through the end of Dutch colonialism, the Japanese occupation, the Indonesian Nationalist Revolution, Suharto’s New Order regime, and the riots of 1997-98. Though a minority, they had great influence on municipal and national culture due to their position as interlocutors between colonial and local cultures.  Mrázek began his study hoping to get the elderly Jakartans’ perspectives on the experience of colonization, but instead they wanted to give incredibly personal, piecemeal accounts of everyday life.  Their stories focus predominantly on the experience of growing up in the colony and how things had changed in comparison to their childhoods.  Mrázek uses these ethnographic accounts to provide an alternative history of Jakarta and infuses the manuscript with his own readings of literature and social theory as well. Figures such as Benjamin, Brecht, Proust, and Heidegger appear as fellow wanderers, conversing with him and with those he interviewed.  Throughout, Mrázek frequently refers to architecture and landscape, and the title itself is a reference to Le Corbusier’s promenade architecture.

Mrázek begins by surveying the contemporary landscape of Jakarta, laying out the geography of the sprawling modernist asphalt-covered metropolis through the words of his interviewees.  The patchwork of their memories reveals a distinct temporality of the elderly; the stories that they told often start in the middle of their lives, or with a random memory, and wander throughout their histories, their houses, and the city more broadly. Mrázek then focuses specifically on stories about childhood homes, finding that their stories about home betray details about social class and family dynamics that would not otherwise be so explicitly expressed. Drawing on Baudelaire’s notion of the bourgeois home, specifically the presence of toys and the manners of the salon, Mrázek reveals a modernist capitalism at home in metropolitan Indonesia.  The author then goes on to connect the home to the street in the memories of the elderly.  For the Indonesians Mrázek talked with, fences were always low, gates always open, and distinctions between interior and exterior were arbitrary at best.  In their recollections of the Japanese occupation, the elderly recalled how the house became even less intimate, as most Jakartans had to sell personal items from the home to get by. Mrázek then turns to the school as a metaphor for the colony more generally, showing how school was a place of both discipline and wonderment in the memories of the elderly.  The author concludes with discussions of windows, and he finds that windows and voices that travel through them served as connections between the world outside and the Western disciplinary milieu of the colony.