(The Jakarta Post, August 10, 2015)
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| Ariel Heryanto is signing his book after the book launch at UGM, Yogyakarta |
It's late Thursday afternoon, the sun is slowly falling into a pink orange horizon and a coffee shop in South Jakarta is filled with people eager to hear a presentation by Ariel Heryanto, one of the country's most well-established intellectuals.
Stationed at Australian National University in Canberra, Ariel has returned home to promote his most recent work of scholarship, Identitas dan Kenikmatan: Politik Budaya Layar Indonesia. The book is an Indonesian translation of the original English version, Identity and Pleasure: The Politics of Indonesian Screen Culture, published late last year.
When questioned why he decided to dedicate his working life to pursuits of the mind, Ariel replies, in clipped English, that 'it was the only thing I could do'.
After the collapse of guided democracy and the rise of Soeharto's New Order, options for Indonesians of Chinese descent narrowed considerably and Ariel suffered from the distortions of state-sanctioned discrimination.
Banned from attending major universities, or if not banned, asked to pay prohibitively expensive course fees, Ariel attended a private and inconspicuous Christian university located in small town Central Java and then continued his studies abroad, first in the US and later Australia, where he earned his doctorate specializing in the emerging field of cultural anthropology.
Authoritarianism, in all its forms, corrodes the mind because the expansiveness and possibilities of thought must be clipped and shadowed to make the mind conform to dogmatic principles or a specific vision of life.
When discussing the intellectual influences that have shaped Ariel, it becomes clear that the New Order regime acted as the pillar against which Ariel organized himself.
Attracted to Marxism, the radicalism of the French post-structuralists and certain elements of the American New Left, these philosophical traditions all offered Ariel a kind of intellectual rebellion against the form of order erected by Soeharto and his allies.
The French, he says, were exciting simply because 'they were so anarchic and destabilizing. I grew up in a particular time when order was sacred, was everything. I mean militarist order. So anything disorderly attracted me'.
Speaking of the kind of life he envisioned as a young man, Ariel noted that, ' I would not be able to formulate that very well, but definitely to get rid of the military dictatorship. We knew what we did not want, I don'€™t think we quite knew what we wanted, to be honest'.
The result of research spanning four years, between 2009 and 2012, Identity and Pleasure explores the politics of identity and pleasure through the medium of screen culture.
Specifically, Ariel attempts to explain and clarify two striking characteristics of Indonesian life in the two decades following the collapse of the New Order.
First, Ariel tries to explain the tremendous explosion of Islamic-themed popular culture and the similarly wild reception of Korean popular culture in the archipelago.
And second, Ariel explores how certain political cultures in Indonesia have been avoided, repressed or forgotten by society, particularly those cultures connected to the mass murder of 1965-1966 and the centuries-long discrimination against ethnic Chinese and lower-income Indonesians.
The metastasizing Islamization of Indonesia is a subject of considerable interest for many. In Identity and Pleasure, Ariel considers how religious observance finds embodiment in the history of industrial capitalism in Indonesia and how the logic of capitalism responds to today's growing market for Islamic lifestyles.
Taking inspiration from the concept of 'Post-Islamism' proposed by scholar Asef Bayat, Ariel analyses how certain segments of Indonesian-Muslim youth have rejected the dictates of dogmatic Islamism, and in its place, have attempted to construct an alternative to reconcile the realities of modernity with religious observance.
Ariel describes Post-Islamism as both a condition and a project, an enterprise to unify religiosity with rights, faith with liberty, Islam with freedom.
But the Post-Islamism that Ariel emphasizes here is really cultural Post-Islamism. The process of Islamization and its Post-Islamist backlash seems to have taken place simultaneously in Indonesia, and both of these forces contradict one another. This process, among others, illustrates the fierce contestation of identity in Indonesia.
The phenomenon of the film Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love) 'in the cinematic battle behind its production, the eventual end product presented on film and the responses from Indonesian audiences' serves as an interesting example.
In addition to the representation of Islamic themes on screen, Ariel explores some other products of screen culture that exhibit the process of redefining identity in Indonesia.
Some new films produced by a younger generation of Indonesians depict what were once marginalized and shadowy subjects (Chinese ethnicity, the role of the Indonesian Communist Party in the country's history) from a different perspective and one that often challenges the approved perspective built up and propagandized by the New Order regime.
Furthermore, the active role of young Indonesian women in accommodating and supporting screen culture from South Korea can be viewed as another attempt to form a new identity as a modern and cosmopolitan citizen.
This condition demonstrates the easing of racial prejudice and ethnic tension, as well as a new kind of hybridity in Post-Islamist circles. If you've ever expressed wonder at the sight of young women in hijabs dancing frenetically to K-Pop hits, Ariel'€™s book may well offer you some explanation for this curious reality.
For Indonesians in particular, the book offers insight into how political contestation and the search for identity is a continuous process and one that largely defines what Indonesia means, and what it means to be an Indonesian.
The book emphasizes the importance and value of interpreting the diversity of identities that constitute the rich body of Indonesia, as opposed to some program to try and streamline or compress these varied identities into a singular, state-approved form.
The book, though scholarly and restrained in its prose, has a critical fervor to it and it could generate energy for social change in the future if it is picked up by a younger generation of Indonesians.
For readers who are interested in the topic of Post-Islamism, the book demonstrates that there are still open spaces for further research. One that comes immediately to mind is how a Post-Islamist generation might respond to more challenging matters dealing with issues of human rights and freedom such as those that are presently being discussed globally.
Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/08/10/all-world-s-a-stage-ariel-heryanto-and-politics-screen-culture.html
