`Chinese' Indonesians in national cinema 1

Author: Sen, Krishna

Source: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 7, Number 1, Number 1/March 2006 , pp. 171-184(14)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

Through much of post-colonial history and particularly during the so-called `New Order' (under General Suharto), Indonesian citizens of ethnic Chinese descent have been caught in a strangely ambiguous position: they have enjoyed enormous economic power while at the same time being threatened with politico-cultural effacement. This paper is an attempt to understand that ambiguity in relation to the Indonesian cinema – both around questions of industry history and around issues of representation of national and ethnic identity on screen. The paper traces the presence, the erasure and the absent-presence of Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority from the establishment of a film industry in Indonesia in the 1930s to the post-New Order political shifts, opening up possibilities for a new public discourse of Chineseness. I argue however that the openness of current Indonesian culture and politics, while providing the necessary condition for re-imagining the Chinese Indonesians, does not ensure a radical shift in a politics of representation, deeply embedded in the textual practices of the film industry and more widely in the cultural and political history of modern Indonesia.

Keywords: Indonesia; Chinese Indonesians; cinema; politics; film industry; ethnicity; citizenship

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649370500463877

Publication date: 2006-03-01

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