Performing Power

Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

By: Arnout van der Meer

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Hardcover | 1 July 2021

At a Glance

Hardcover
300 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7

Hardcover

$218.90

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Performing Power illuminates how colonial dominance in Indonesia was legitimized, maintained, negotiated, and contested through the everyday staging and public performance of power between the colonizer and colonized.

Arnout Van der Meer's Performing Power explores what seemingly ordinary interactions reveal about the construction of national, racial, social, religious, and gender identities as well as the experience of modernity in colonial Indonesia. Through acts of everyday resistance, such as speaking a different language, withholding deference, and changing one's appearance and consumer behavior, a new generation of Indonesians contested the hegemonic colonial appropriation of local culture and the racial and gender inequalities that it sustained. Over time these relationships of domination and subordination became inverted, and by the twentieth century the Javanese used the tropes of Dutch colonial behavior to subvert the administrative hierarchy of the state.

Thanks to generous funding from the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the Mellon Foundation the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access (OA) volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other Open Access repositories.

Industry Reviews

Performing Power is a sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written contribution to the historical scholarship on colonialism in Indonesia, demonstrating the richness and diversity among Indonesians debating competing notions of civil and human rights, morality, piety, modernity, agency, and an emerging national identity.

-- Susie Protschky, Deakin University * KNHG/BMGN *

Arnout van der Meer's book seeks to address the lacuna and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the novel aspects of European colonialism in Indonesia, especially in Java. Van der Meer examines how Dutch power was built and maintained through language, clothing, customs, etiquette, status symbols, sitting positions, physical gestures, postures, food consumption, architecture, and urban planning.

* The Unversity of British Columbia *

The books focus on material culture and quotidian realities is its biggest strength as the vivid and fine-grained descriptions make for engagining reading.

* Sojourn *

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