Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts (Memory Politics and Transitional Justice) 3030410943, 9783030410940

Citation preview

MIGRATION, MEMORY POLITICS AND TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts Pauline Stoltz

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice

Series Editors Jasna Dragovic-Soso Goldsmiths University of London London, UK Jelena Subotic Georgia State University Atlanta, GA, USA Tsveta Petrova Columbia University New York, NY, USA

The interdisciplinary fields of Memory Studies and Transitional Justice have largely developed in parallel to one another despite both focusing on efforts of societies to confront and (re-)appropriate their past. While scholars working on memory have come mostly from historical, literary, sociological, or anthropological traditions, transitional justice has attracted primarily scholarship from political science and the law. This series bridges this divide: it promotes work that combines a deep understanding of the contexts that have allowed for injustice to occur with an analysis of how legacies of such injustice in political and historical memory influence contemporary projects of redress, acknowledgment, or new cycles of denial. The titles in the series are of interest not only to academics and students but also practitioners in the related fields. The Memory Politics and Transitional Justice series promotes critical dialogue among different theoretical and methodological approaches and among scholarship on different regions. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines – including political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies – that confront critical questions at the intersection of memory politics and transitional justice in national, comparative, and global perspective. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice Book Series (Palgrave) Co-editors: Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London), Jelena Subotic (Georgia State University), Tsveta Petrova (Columbia University) Editorial Board Paige Arthur, New York University Center on International Cooperation Alejandro Baer, University of Minnesota Orli Fridman, Singidunum University Belgrade Carol Gluck, Columbia University Katherine Hite, Vassar College Alexander Karn, Colgate University Jan Kubik, Rutgers University and School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London Bronwyn Leebaw, University of California, Riverside Jan-Werner Mueller, Princeton University Jeffrey Olick, University of Virginia Kathy Powers, University of New Mexico Joanna R. Quinn, Western University Jeremy Sarkin, University of South Africa Leslie Vinjamuri, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Sarah Wagner, George Washington University

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14807

Pauline Stoltz

Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts

Pauline Stoltz Department of Politics and Society Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Memory Politics and Transitional Justice ISBN 978-3-030-41094-0 ISBN 978-3-030-41095-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Oliver J Davis Photography This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

In the mid-1990s, I was living in Sweden and during one of my trips to the Netherlands, the country of my birth, I got hold of a novel called Indische Duinen (1994). The author was Adriaan van Dis. Eventually, it was translated into numerous languages, including into English as My Father’s War (2004). The narrative is loosely based on the life of van Dis and he tells it from the perspective of a son, born in the Netherlands as part of a ‘mixed-race’ family. Later, in Chapters 4 and 5, I will explain more about the politics of naming but, for now, it is enough to state that the rest of the family shares a past in the Dutch East Indies—the former Dutch colony today called Indonesia—while the son does not. He grows up in an atmosphere of sorrow, which he tries to understand, but he has difficulty grasping it since there are so many silences about the contexts of the military conflicts and the events that took place during the 1940s in the Dutch East Indies and Indonesia, both within his family and in the wider Dutch society. How then, can one make sense of what has happened and of oneself in relation to this silenced past? When I read the novel, I trembled my way through the pages. This was recognizable. This could have been written about my own family. Here was somebody who had put into words the strange relations which I did not understand in my own family and who tried to grasp the past to find a place in the present, the way I did. Here I was, in Sweden, far away from both the Netherlands and Indonesia, and suddenly I felt recognized.

v

vi

PREFACE

How to Make Sense of the Past? My mother rarely if ever talked about her youth. She was born in Batavia (contemporary Jakarta, Indonesia) in 1935 as the daughter of a white Dutch military father who had moved there as a young man and a ‘mixedrace’ mother who worked as a head teacher at one of the local schools. My grandfather died when my mother was three months old and she lived with her mother and three siblings through the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during WWII (1942–1945) and the following violent conflict over Indonesian independence (1945–1949). This period lasted throughout the whole of the 1940s or, in other words, from when my mother was about seven years of age until she was 14. In 1950, when my mother was 15, my grandmother, her children and several other surviving relatives moved to the Netherlands as part of the large postcolonial migration that took place at the time. Here, a different life awaited, with both ups and downs. As a child, I sensed that my mother had mixed feelings about the country of her birth and her past. She hardly ever spoke about Indonesia or about her youth. She subscribed to magazines and newsletters for people with her Indonesian background, but kept these from the rest of our family. It seemed as though this was her part of the world and her past and that it had nothing to do with my father, my two brothers or me. Somehow, it felt as though my mother had decided this on behalf of all of us, regardless of what we thought about the matter. My mother never returned to Indonesia. After her death in 2011, she left papers in which she described what she would like to happen during her memorial service. The migration from Indonesia to the Netherlands and the encounter between Asia and Europe were here indicated in a few words as being central elements of her life. This was made clear, according to the orthodox Calvinist vicar who led the service and who had known my mother for many years, by her choice of music, the Misa Criolla, a non-Latin Mass in Spanish, inspired by the events of WWII in Germany, and created by Argentinian composer Ariel Ramirez. My mother wanted us to play the interpretation by the Spanish tenor José Carreras. The vicar claimed that the piece fuses European and non-European elements and noted that Carreras interpreted the despair in the music in a more restrained way than some of the Argentinian versions he knew. He found this a remarkable choice.

PREFACE

vii

What I found more telling was her struggle to decide upon the place at which she wanted us to spread her ashes. At first, this was over the North Sea, in the place where, in 1950, the ship that brought her from Indonesia had arrived in the Netherlands. However, she changed her mind. In another and later version of her instructions, she wanted to be buried together with my father and my older brother outside the city of Tiel, her hometown of 40 years, which was situated in the middle of the Netherlands, by the river Waal. My younger brother, my daughter and I chose this latter option. Looking back, it was oddly enough not until sometime in the 1990s, when I was in my 30s and had already been living in Sweden for many years, that it dawned on me that my mother had lived through a war during most of her childhood. It also struck me that I knew hardly anything at all about that war, not only because I had heard nothing from my mother, but also because I had not learned anything about it at school either. Certainly, I had learned about WWII, but this concerned Germany and the Jews and barely mentioned the war in Indonesia or Asia. In addition, I actually knew very little about Dutch colonialism. Neither did I know what life had been like when my mother came to the Netherlands. What was it like to come to this cold country in the north where my white-looking mother and her slightly darker-looking siblings and mother must have had a different experience of what it meant to be ‘white’ or ‘brown’ than what this meant during the Japanese occupation or the Indonesian war of independence that they had left behind? The type of confusion I found myself experiencing is a phenomenon that, over the years, I eventually learned was something that many activists in the Netherlands had commented upon with regret and contempt. The silence I experienced from my mother, at school and in the rest of Dutch society was thus more complicated than an absence of voices talking about these issues. I just had not heard these voices, or had not paid enough attention to them. I must seem very slow in understanding that my mother had experienced war when she was a child in light of what should seem obvious to any outsider. Strangely, it also took me years to formulate the hypothesis that, not only did my mother and other family members have experiences of WWII in Asia and the following war of independence in Indonesia, but also that these experiences could have marked them for life. Her behaviour, which in my eyes sometimes seemed strange later in her life in relation to stress, quarrels, danger and trauma could very well have

viii

PREFACE

been the result of how she had (not) learned to deal with these issues when she was a child; a war child. Overall, I had difficulty imagining her as a child, since she never helped me to do so. She never spoke of it. The issue was taboo.

Shards of Narrative Over the last 20 years or more, I have uncovered a little about what happened to my family between the 1930s and 1950s, by means of narratives from relatives in the Netherlands and the USA. This also includes the only (heart-breaking) conversation on the matter that I ever had with my mother, shortly after my daughter and I had returned from our first trip to Indonesia in 1996. From these sources, I learned that the Japanese took my grandmother’s two brothers as prisoners of war to build the Burma railway. One survived and one did not. On his way back through Asia, the surviving brother met a Thai woman whom he later married. Her name was Noe, and the only way I know that is because my mother named our first Siamese cat after her. This uncle and his wife settled in New Guinea. I later learned that many ‘mixed-race’ people had moved to build a new society in New Guinea here during the 1940s, but I still have no idea how involved my relatives were in this. Other relatives were imprisoned in Japanese camps in Indonesia or witnessed and survived the genocide committed by Indonesian nationalists in Surabaya in 1945. I learned that Japanese soldiers or Indonesian nationalists had raped, tortured or murdered relatives during this period. Apparently, they had suffered a great deal of violence before they left Indonesia to move to the Netherlands or to other parts of the world. The novel by van Dis that I mentioned earlier contributed to my realization that there was a relationship, a link, between the individual memories of war and colonialism in my family, on the one hand, and collective memories of the military conflicts and global political events of the 1940s, on the other. The personal turned out to be political, as the feminist and the political scientist in me wants to say. One of the intriguing things that narratives can do—not only as told in autobiographies or interviews, but also in novels, exhibitions, films etc.— is that they produce meaning. Moreover, as Molly Andrews has pointed out, both individuals and states can use narratives strategically, to enable a progression from a traumatic past into the future (Andrews, 2007).

PREFACE

ix

As a political scientist, I therefore find fiction to be important as a source of knowledge and meaning in the politics of memory of the Netherlands and Indonesia. At the time I am writing this, in the late 2010s, the opportunity to interview people who were children in the 1940s and willing to talk about their childhood and give first-hand accounts, is rapidly disappearing. Many of those involved are now old and more have already passed away (but see the interview collection of the oral history project of the Stichting Mondelinge Geschiedenis Indonesië, which was completed in 2001 and is housed by the KITLV and the University of Leiden in the Netherlands). Since so little was said about these issues in my family and in the Dutch society in which I grew up, some of the few sources to which I felt I could turn in order to fill the gap in my knowledge, and to attempt to make sense of the past, were novels like Indische Duinen by van Dis. Another source that had a great impact on me was the Indonesian novel Keluarga Gerilya by Ananta Toer (1950). I read the Dutch translation of 1990 entitled Guerilla familie [in English: Guerrilla family] of this latter book, unable as I was to understand Indonesian. Pramoedya wrote this novel at the end of the period during which the military conflicts took place. Later, he became one of the most internationally renowned Indonesian authors. He was a youth when he wrote the novel and in it he used his experiences of war and violence while struggling on the side of the Indonesian nationalists against the Dutch. Pramoedya wrote this novel after the Dutch had captured him and while he was in prison between 1947 and 1949. Pramoedya is interesting for more reasons than his knowledge about the 1940s from the perspective of an Indonesian intellectual, although I did not follow up on this until recently. Eventually, and inspired by his novels, I started to learn more about post-independence political and social transformations in Indonesia. This included learning about the genocide of 1965, when an authoritarian military regime under the leadership of President Suharto replaced President Sukarno’s post-independence left-leaning politics of Guided Democracy. One of the critics of the military regime was Pramoedya Ananta Toer and, once again, he was imprisoned. During his prison-life between 1965 and 1979 on the island of Buru, Pramoedya composed his most famous and internationally acclaimed work, the four-part epic, the Buru Quartet, which addressed the political history of Indonesia around the turn of the twentieth century. It consists of the novels This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations,

x

PREFACE

Footsteps and House of Glass, which were published in Indonesian between 1980 and 1988. In these novels, Pramoedya wrote about the colonial past in order to comment on the authoritarian present of the 1960s and 1970s, in a quest to find strategies for a more just and equal future. He did this not only from anti-racist and anti-colonial perspectives but, interestingly enough, also from feminist and cosmopolitan perspectives.

There Must Be More… I started this preface with a personal narrative, but eventually my search for understanding became a professional question. It increasingly struck me how the personal was political and how individual and collective narratives are related. I started to search for ways to analyse Dutch and Indonesian novels about the transnational memories of historical inequalities and injustices in the Netherlands and Indonesia from the perspective of feminist political science. My motivation to begin this study was my urge to learn more about the contexts and events that influenced the lives of my mother, her siblings, my grandmother, my grandmother’s siblings and their children, and that have influenced my life and those of my brothers and cousins. For a long time, I believed that my mother’s part of the family consisted of a long line of strong, independent and adventurous women. They had experienced times of colonialism and war, migrated to the other side of the world, dealt with memories of violence and encountered racism, but they had also worked hard and somehow managed to survive. They were women to be proud of and have as role models. They were beautiful as well. Somehow, the men seemed rather uninteresting, or just dead. However, over time this became much too simplistic for me. There is much more to say about narratives of gender, postcolonial migration and transnational memories of violent conflicts and about resistance to denials of political responsibility. Moreover, there is much, much more to say about Indonesia. Shall we move on? Malmö, Sweden

Pauline Stoltz

PREFACE

xi

References Ananta Toer, P. (1950). Keluarga Gerilya. Jakarta: Hasta Mitra. Ananta Toer, P. (1990). Guerilla familie. (Keluarga Gerilya, 1950) (Cara Ella Bouwman, Trans.). Breda: Uitgeverij de Geus. Andrews, M. (2007). Shaping History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. van Dis, A. (1994). Indische Duinen. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. van Dis, A. (2004). My Father’s War. (Dutch original, Indische Duinen, 1994) (I. Rilke, Trans.). London: William Heinemann.

Acknowledgements

People who know me, or have met me, have often realized that this book means a lot to me. Like many other studies, it has been long in the making. On a personal level, the process has been nerve-wracking as well as cathartic. On a professional level, I hope that I have something to contribute to research in the field. I am extremely grateful that, over the years, I have not been alone on my journey. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank some of the people who have followed me along the way and who have provided me with their generous support. I would also like to extend my gratitude to everybody I do not mention here, and I apologize now for not having done so. There are too many of you. To all those unnamed, I bow down in appreciation of your support. About ten years ago, Cecilia Hansson, Inge Eriksson and Bo Isenberg were amongst the people who encouraged me to develop my initial and tentative thoughts about doing ‘something’ with (at this stage only) Dutch novels and memories of violent conflicts in Indonesia. Other colleagues and friends with whom I worked at the time, at the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University in Sweden, include (in alphabetical order): Patrik Hall, Astrid Hedin, Anders Hellström, Ane Kirkegaard, Tom Nilsson, Jan Rudelius, and Erika Svedberg. In addition, colleagues from my alma mater, Lund University in Sweden, have always been encouraging. I would especially like to mention Karin Aggestam, Annika Bergman Rosamond, Catarina Kinnvall, Annica Kronsell and Diana Mulinari. Thank you all!

xiii

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During my time at Malmö University, I had the great honour and privilege to be involved in INU international summer school activities, which took place at Hiroshima University in Japan. Joined by students and scholars from around the world, for a number of years I spent every August discussing issues related to global citizenship and peace. We also attended the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony, which was always an emotional and thought-provoking event. I am certain that this book would not have been possible without these experiences. This was thanks not least to Hajime Nishitani from Hiroshima University and Lennart Olausson from Malmö University. Eventually, I started working as an Associate Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark. Here, at FREIA, the gender research centre, I worked with Birte Siim, whose enthusiastic support has been invaluable over the years. Birte and other colleagues from Aalborg, notably Kathrine Bjerg Bennike, Ann-Dorte Christensen and Helene Pristed Nielsen, have read and commented upon more or less confused drafts of the various chapters. Despite my own doubts, they have always remained optimistic that the results would be interesting and readable (which I hope they are in the present version). Thank you! There are too many colleagues at Aalborg University whom I would like to thank. These include the members of FREIA and the members of the narrative network. Naming everyone is an impossible task, but I would especially like to recognize (in alphabetical order): Sutanuka Banerjee, Lotte Bloksgaard, Anette Borchorst, Diana Højlund Madsen, Tabitta Flyger, Inger Glavind Bo, Hanan Lassen Zackaria, Aske Laursen Brock, Trine Lund Thomsen, Ann-Elen Orvik, Martin Ottavay Jørgensen, Dennis Puorideme, Sune Qvotrup Jensen, Lise Rolandsen Agustín, Supriya Samanta, Anna Stegger Gemzøe, Stine Thidemann Faber and Augustine Yelfaanibe. A number of honorary, guest and visiting professors at FREIA and Aalborg University have provided very important feedback and support, which has been invaluable for my thinking and writing during this study. I would especially like to mention Jane Parpart, Anne Phoenix and Anna Reading, who have commented upon drafts at different stages of the process. I would also like to thank Nina Glick Schiller and Nira YuvalDavis for providing the kind of inspiration that any researcher needs. Thanks to the Julie von Müllens Fond, I had the opportunity to visit the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden, the Netherlands, for three months during the spring

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xv

of 2014. My stay in the Netherlands gave me the final push that I needed to develop the approach to this study and, eventually, after I had recovered from a cancer treatment, to start writing. I would like to thank a few of the Dutch and Indonesian colleagues who were working and staying at the KITLV at the time. These include (in alphabetical order): Tom van den Berge, Farabi Fakih, Budi Hernawan, Jacky Hicks, Tom Hoogervorst, Nico van Horn, Gerry van Klinken, David Kloos, Gert Oostindie, Irene Rolfes, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Yayah Siegers, Fridus Steijlen, Willem van der Molen and Kathryn Wellen. My stay in the Netherlands would not have been as successful without the support of three gender scholars. Pamela Pattynama advised me to take an interest in research on memory studies, which at the time seemed far removed from my background in political science. Saskia Wieringa was heavily occupied in 2014 with the preparations for the IPT 1965, which took place the year after, but she still repeatedly took the time to encourage a confused colleague who knew embarrassingly little about Indonesia. Finally, Sawitri Saharso read and commented upon my initial ideas and pushed me in the right direction. I am immensely grateful to these scholars and cannot thank them enough for their inspiration and suggestions. The Nordic Institute for Asian Studies has been another source of inspiration and support by means of its different networks. I would like to thank Karin Ask, Karl Gustavsson and Mikako Iwatake for feedback on my initial ideas for this study. Over the years, Gerald Jackson, Monica Lindberg Falk and Cecilia Milwertz have been important. Most of all, I would like to thank Wil Burghoorn, who has commented upon confused drafts and with whom it is always a pleasure to discuss political, social and cultural developments in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Wil’s encouragement has been invaluable! Distress over the deaths and memories of a number of relatives, old and young, have influenced my work on this study. This includes the deaths of my parents, as well as my Aunt Selma and Uncle Dik. In addition, my young brothers Roel and Lodewijk, as well as my cousins Esther and Bas, all died much too young. I hope they may rest in peace. The love and support of a number of close friends and relatives from Sweden and the Netherlands have made writing this book (and life in general) easier. You know who you are and how you have supported me. Thank you! In alphabetical order, I would especially like to thank Anneke and Bengt, Annika and Aaron, Berit and Lennart, Cilla and Kay, Ineke,

xvi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Jannie, Jenny, Karl and Barbro, Malla, Monika, Per and Agneta, Sanna and Hans, Titti and Ulla and Kaj. In Sweden, I would like to thank Julia, Lars Joel, Agnes, Gabriella, and Karin. In the Netherlands, I would like to thank Loelies and Bert, who have always provided me with relevant newspaper articles and books and who have been eager to discuss these with me wherever we meet. From the Kors family, I would like to thank Ees, Hugo, Selma and Wim and their children, and Alexander and Lobke and their children.

Contents

1

2

3

Introduction: Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories 1.1 Three Violent Conflicts 1.2 Gender, Silence and Denial 1.3 Power, Resistance and Narrative Struggles 1.4 Overview of the Book References

1 4 7 10 14 17

Globalization, Intersectional Inequalities and Narrative Struggles 2.1 Transitional Justice 2.2 Memory Politics 2.3 Gender and Transnational Approaches 2.4 Resistance and Affective Relations 2.5 Narratives of Memories of Violent Conflicts 2.6 Narrative Mobility and Tellability 2.7 Innovative Approaches and Perspectives References

23 24 28 31 34 36 40 41 43

Transitional Justice Norms: the UN, Indonesia and the Netherlands 3.1 Norm Translation as International and Transnational Relations

49 50 xvii

xviii

4

5

6

CONTENTS

3.2 The UN, Genocide, Decolonization and Gender 3.3 Dutch Denials 3.4 Indonesian Denials 3.5 Resistance to Denial in the Netherlands 3.6 Resistance to Denial in Indonesia 3.7 Norm Translation, Appropriation and Contestation References

52 56 59 62 65 69 70

Silence, Violence and Gendered Resistance 4.1 Silence, Voice and Agency 4.2 Indische duinen vs. My Father’s War 4.3 Intersectionality, Boundary-Making and Border Crossings 4.4 The Queering of Roots and Routes 4.5 Resistance and the Politics of Privilege 4.6 Everyday Forms of Resistance References

77 79 82

Masculinities, Intersectionality and Transnational Memories 5.1 Hegemonic Masculinity, Intersectionality and Transnational Memories 5.2 The Interpreter from Java 5.3 An Unclear Path to a Dominant Masculine Place 5.4 Transnational Memories of Decolonization, War and Violence 5.5 Masculinities and Transnational Remembering 5.6 Masculinities and Resistance in Transnational Space References Narrating the Nation and Queering Transitional Justice 6.1 Gender, Sexuality and Transitional Justice 6.2 Durga/Umayi 6.3 Queering National Identity 6.4 Narrating the Nation 6.5 Resisting Marginalization in Transitional Justice 6.6 Anti-communism and Political Homophobia References

86 91 94 98 99

103 104 109 112 116 119 123 124 129 131 136 140 144 148 153 155

CONTENTS

7

Denial, Hope and Transnational Affective Relations 7.1 Implicated Subjects, Denials and Affective Dissonance 7.2 Home 7.3 Victims, Perpetrators and Observers 7.4 Knowledge and Denial 7.5 Memory, Hope and Activism 7.6 Transnational Affective Relations References

Index

xix

159 162 167 170 175 180 186 187 191

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories

It was his war, not mine. Not yet. [Het was zijn oorlog, niet de mijne. Nog niet.] (Birney, 2016, p. 278, transl. PS)

In this study, I take my starting point in the struggles over narratives about memories of political violence during the Indonesian war of independence (1945–1949) and relate these to the struggles during two other violent conflicts. The memories of the war of independence are often related, in both Indonesia and the Netherlands, to memories of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies during WWII (1942– 1945). This is not strange, since these conflicts merged into each other overnight, when the Japanese surrendered, and Indonesian nationalists declared independence from Dutch colonial rule only a few days later. The Dutch refusal to accept this declaration extended the period of violence for another four years (Cribb, 2010). Moreover, individual and collective memories of these two violent conflicts relate in turn to memories of the genocide that took place in Indonesia in 1965, only a few years later. This link to the past is especially noticeable in Indonesia, but it has also influenced contemporary international and transnational relations between Indonesia and other parts of the world, including the Netherlands. Transitional justice measures targeted at the memories of this genocide also remain few (see McGregor, Melvin, & Pohlman, 2018; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). © The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_1

1

2

P. STOLTZ

I am especially concerned with the resistance to denials of political and moral responsibility and the transnational processes that have influenced the narrative struggles over memories of political violence (including sexual violence) during these three conflicts. We can observe continued and recurrent resistance to denials of such responsibility in both the Netherlands and Indonesia as well as, to a certain extent, in other parts of the world. Better knowledge about gender, intersectional power relations and social inequalities can enhance our understanding of the political strategies developed by individuals and groups to resist silences in order to gain more knowledge about what has happened and address the denials of responsibility by governments and other political actors in order to obtain justice and equality. What is puzzling is why such resistance is unsuccessful, despite a growing acceptance of international norms on transitional justice since the 1940s, including norms on how to address gender in post-conflict transformations (as codified in, e.g., UNSCR 1325). Today, international actors such as the European Union and the United Nations are putting pressure on national actors to include transitional justice measures in any transformation process after violent conflicts. This is not an exception, but rather a rule, and includes established democracies as well as authoritarian regimes in both the Global North and the Global South (see Winter, 2014). The aim of this study is to map intersectional inequalities, especially as these relate to gender, ‘race’ and related categories, in the contexts of narratives of individual, collective and transnational memories of the three conflicts. I investigate how these inequalities have allowed injustices to occur, how the legacies of these injustices in people’s memories continue to influence contemporary inequalities, and finally how these inequalities and injustices influence resistance and projects of redress and recognition, or new cycles of denial. More specifically, the aim of the study is to investigate how gender and resistance to silences and denials are relevant in personal, social and strategic narratives of transnational memories of the three violent conflicts in Indonesia (1942–2015). Theoretically, I engage with research in the fields of memory politics and transitional justice (see Chapter 2; for general introductions to these fields, see Buckley-Zistel, Koloma Beck, Braun, & Mieth, 2014; Tota & Hagen, 2015). I will argue that there are assumptions in these fields of research that impose limitations on the use we can make of them in the study of gender and resistance in memories of violent conflicts.

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

3

I suggest that we address these limitations by using transnational, gender and intersectional approaches, such as those found in feminist and postcolonial research (Chakrabarty, 2008; Guha, 1998; Krishna, 2009; Mohanty, 2002; Spivak, 1988; Yuval-Davis, 2011) and in research on transnational memories (Assmann, 2014; Assmann & Conrad, 2010). I will combine new theoretical understandings of gender (including masculinities, intersectional and queer theories) with theories on resistance (Lilja, Baaz, Schulz, & Vinthagen, 2017). This includes how resistance relates to the political dynamics of emotions such as empathy and anger and emotional agency after trauma (Hemmings, 2012; Hutchison, 2016; Pedwell, 2014). Processes of representation play a key role in making traumatic events, such as violent conflicts, collectively meaningful. Traumatic encounters might seem individual—because trauma isolates individuals—but trauma can also acquire wider societal and political importance, or, as is the case here, it may not. Trauma can affect those who surround and bear witness to an event and, in doing so, it can shape political communities. At the same time, there is no guarantee of how this process may unfold or whether communities share emotional understandings of a tragedy. There are circumstances in which communities may understand memories of traumatic events and histories in ways that resonate with shared, culturally ascribed notions of how to behave after bereavement and loss and when to show solidarity. In other words, when communities share an understanding of how to work through trauma and they have a common purpose for what they will obtain, then this politics of emotions helps a community to move on (Hutchison, 2016, pp. 3–4). Here, these circumstances apparently do not exist. One of the main arguments I make in this study is that we need to pay closer attention to the complexities of the gendered silences, denials and emotions of victims, perpetrators and observers, when we want to understand instances of resistance to the political and moral denial of responsibility for human rights abuses and historical injustices. Another argument is that we need to take seriously what happens in transnational space in relation to the travelling of memories. The politics of location, including how memories are sent and received and how emotions relating to memories matter in activism, are important in this context. Another important dimension of what happens in transnational space is the translations and contestations of global norms on transitional justice.

4

P. STOLTZ

Let me continue by providing a short background to the political violence and denials of responsibility in Indonesia and the Netherlands, especially as this relates to notions of gender and resistance, silence and denial. I will then briefly introduce my approach to the study of narratives of memories of traumatic events and provide a short research overview of postcolonial feminism, transitional justice and memory politics. Finally, I describe how the argument will be developed in the following chapters.

1.1

Three Violent Conflicts

We can understand the politics of memory and the narrative struggles around the three violent conflicts I described above against the background of norms, measures and discourses on transitional justice. This can be understood as ‘a concept and a process that encompasses a number of different legal, political and cultural instruments and mechanisms that can strengthen, weaken, enhance or accelerate processes of regime change and consolidation’ (Mihr, 2017, p. 1). In other words, governments and societies can choose to use transitional justice measures to deal with an unjust or atrocious past in order to redress legacies of massive human rights abuses. This can include judicial and non-judicial measures, such as apologies, truth commissions and reparations for victims and their descendants. It might also include the involvement of the International Criminal Court (based in The Hague in the Netherlands). Additionally, it can include the arts (e.g. photo exhibitions, films or novels), the use of memorials and the use of ‘indigenous’ norms, ‘traditional’ mechanisms and healing rituals (see Simic, 2017). In contrast, successive Dutch governments have been reluctant to use such measures and thus, to a certain extent, they have denied responsibility for the mass violence inflicted by the Dutch armed forces during the Indonesian war of independence, despite evidence of its occurrence (Limpach, 2016; Oostindie, 2015; Van den Herik, 2012). It might not seem strange, perhaps, that denials of responsibility occur in the Netherlands, because the Dutch can be perceived as the perpetrators and the colonial rulers who perhaps believed that they could, literally, get away with murder, but it is strange that there have been few reactions to these injustices from Indonesian governments, since these could represent the victims. Such silence seems counter-intuitive, since Indonesian victims, their descendants and activists have repeatedly demanded recognition, reparations and justice from the Dutch authorities (see Van den Herik,

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

5

2012). The reactions of observers within a global public sphere and at the level of the UN have also been relatively muted (see Chapters 3 and 7), raising questions about the conditions under which national and transnational forms of organized resistance against denial can be expected to work. This study covers the period between 1942 and 2015. Three commemorations took place in the year 2015, and that is the reason to end the period in this year. Let me start with the first two. The year 2015 marked 70 years after the end of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies during WWII (1942–1945). It also marked 70 years after the Indonesian declaration of independence from the colonial rule of the Netherlands, which started the Indonesian war of independence (1945– 1949). This means that 2015 provided a window of opportunity to not only commemorate but also discuss the political violence that occurred during the Indonesian war of independence. Historians in the Netherlands used this opportunity to present new evidence of the use of extreme mass violence and the occurrence of war crimes. Precise figures for the number of people who were killed during this conflict are difficult to estimate, as are figures indicating the use of (extreme) mass violence and war crimes by all the parties concerned (see Cribb, 1991). The writing of history in the Netherlands has been influenced by postcolonial nostalgia, whereas in Indonesia this episode concerns the history of a heroic freedom struggle against an evil colonial empire (see Limpach, 2016, pp. 769–770; Pattynama, 2014; Wekker, 2016). In 2015, historian Gert Oostindie and his colleagues published a study of 659 ego-documents by veterans from the Dutch colonial armed forces, in which they identified almost 800 war crimes, all committed during the conflict over Indonesian independence. They concluded that this evidence, in combination with the under-reporting of extreme violence, brings the cases of extreme violence up into the tens of thousands (Oostindie, 2015, p. 5). This is confirmed by another historian, Rémy Limpach, who combined a study of previously unexamined official and non-official sources to challenge the official Dutch position held by successive governments, which since 1969 has been that there were only a few incidental excesses of mass violence and that there never was any extreme structural violence (Limpach, 2016, pp. 765–769). The mass media in the Netherlands paid a lot of attention to these ground-breaking studies. The Dutch government did not immediately respond to this coverage, which we could speculatively interpret as meaning that they took sides

6

P. STOLTZ

with those military veterans who were upset over the way in which they were represented (see Chapter 3). The year 2015 also marked the commemoration of 50 years after the genocide of 1965. This concerned, amongst other issues, the mass killings of real and alleged Communists in Indonesia. A common way of referring to this genocide was, and sometimes still is, the careful ‘the events of 1965’ (Peristiwa 65). This euphemism reflects the political sensitivity of the issue and the dangers of addressing it during the period that followed. Arguably, the Indonesian killings are the clearest case of genocide against a socio-political group in the twentieth century. Estimates of the number of men, women and children who were killed range between 500,000– 1,000,000 (McGregor et al., 2018; on the use of the term genocide, see Melvin & Pohlman, 2018; for recent demographic and statistical support for these estimates, see Chandra, 2017). In 1967, the first post-independence President of Indonesia, Sukarno, lost his position to President Suharto. This meant that President Sukarno’s left-leaning politics of Guided Democracy was replaced by an authoritarian, anti-Communist and pro-Western military regime under the leadership of President Suharto and his New Order state (1967– 1998). Suharto, in turn, lost power in 1998 due to the efforts of a prodemocracy movement, after which a period of transition towards a more democratic society began. The post-1998 period is often referred to as one of reformation (Reformasi), but memories of the genocide of 1965 remain a sensitive topic. In addition, in this case, there was a window of opportunity to discuss historical injustices around the year 2015. Due to the international release of two documentary films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), there was a new awareness about the genocide. Indonesian activists used this opportunity to mount the International People’s Tribunal for 1965, a people’s court made up of human rights lawyers, researchers, survivors and their advocates, which tried crimes against humanity committed during this period. The tribunal took place in the Netherlands in late 2015. This increase in domestic and international pressure seemed to have sufficient influence on the government of President Joko Widodo (also known as Jokowi) that it revived previously abandoned thoughts about a law on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Emphasizing reconciliation seemed to slow down again after 2015 (Evanty & Pohlman, 2018, pp. 324–325; see also IPT 1965 Foundation, 2016; Purdey 2018; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019).

1

1.2

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

7

Gender, Silence and Denial

Over the decades, human rights organizations, survivors and their advocates have pointed out in different ways how silence and denial surround the memories of the political violence of the genocide of 1965. It is interesting to note from a gender perspective that, when there has been attention paid to political violence, then this has included a focus on sexual violence (see IPT 1965 Foundation, 2016; Kolimon, Wetangterah, & Campbell-Nelson, 2015; Pohlman, 2015; Wieringa, 2002, 2003; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). There has been less attention paid to issues of sexual violence in the context of activism and research concerning the other two conflicts in this study (for an exception, see McGregor, 2016; see also McGregor & Mackie, 2018, on so-called ‘comfort women’ during the Japanese occupation). In her study entitled White Innocence, professor of gender and ethnicity Gloria Wekker investigates the ‘innocence’ and ‘ignorance’ of the Dutch colonial past amongst the white population of the Netherlands and discusses how this ignorance enabled silences about historical injustices and structural inequalities to occur. It is noteworthy that she uses an intersectional approach in order to investigate different forms of intersecting inequalities in this pursuit (Wekker, 2016; see also Jaffe, 2018). Following Wekker, this study raises questions about the importance of gender and the intersectionality of gender with categories of ‘race’, class, nationality and sexuality in how silences emerge. How, relatedly, have denials of moral and political responsibility occurred (Cohen, 2001)? The normal reactions to Dutch human rights abuses during the Indonesian war of independence (including those related to wartime sexual violence), would require moral and political reactions from both Indonesian and Dutch governments. Successive governments of both states have denied that this is of any concern to them. We could assume that silence about human rights abuses and historical injustices is bad and that people who are silent in such a context are passive and without agency. At a societal level, we could assume that silence about violent conflicts is a way of forgetting. Denial, on the other hand, could be assumed to relate to an active employment of agency. In contrast to these common-sense assumptions, I argue that the notions of both silence and denial are more complex than that. I suggest that unveiling the complexities of these notions is crucial if we want

8

P. STOLTZ

to understand the relevance of gender and resistance to narrative struggles over (transnational) memories of violence. Silences about gender issues in memories of violent conflict can be complex, as Saskia Wieringa, for example, has pointed out in the context of the relationship between postcolonial amnesia and sexual moral panic, and the ways in which sexual politics and nationalism influenced the legitimation of the New Order state in Indonesia (Wieringa, 2006). The Indonesian regime under President Suharto legitimized itself after the genocide of 1965 by means of the destruction of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (Communist Party of Indonesia, PKI), but the military combined this with an orchestrated campaign of slander and sexual innuendo against the women’s organization Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia, Indonesian Women’s Movement). This led to the destruction of what was at the time one of the most powerful women’s movements in the world. This last aspect is often forgotten (Wieringa, 2003; see also Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019), but it raises questions about the political dimensions of memory. This means that silences can be used to protect powerful perpetrators of extreme mass violence, such as individuals and states. They can also work as a protective shield for vulnerable victims during the process of healing, e.g. after torture or sexual violence (see Parpart & Parashar, 2018; Reading, 2011, 2016; Rigney, 2012). Silence and denial can thus work on both the individual and collective levels, and relate to each other. Silence as protection for either victims or perpetrators can function as an implicatory form of denial of the psychological moral implications that conventionally follow facts and the conventional interpretation of these facts (Cohen, 2001, pp. 7–9). A conventional interpretation of acts of violence requires, for example, that victims should feel hurt or angry, and consequently that they should tell this to the world, and that perpetrators should admit guilt and feel ashamed. When victims or perpetrators keep silent and deny these emotions, then we can understand this as a form of implicatory denial. On a collective level, denial of moral and political responsibility can take the form of non-decision-making by politicians. Cohen calls this a refusal to care and refers to it as post-moral denial (Cohen, 2001, pp. 7–9). This form of denial can be vocal and explicit, but it can also be silent and implicit. In both cases, they represent agency. Many aspects of individual and collective memories are not told. We can describe narratives of recollection and silences about violent conflicts

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

9

in different ways, and individuals, groups and states can use them strategically to enable a transition from a traumatic past into the future (see Andrews, 2003). States can ‘cover each other’s backs’ or challenge each other in this regard. I can exemplify this with the help of Jan Pronk, who was, amongst other things, a controversial social democratic Dutch Minister of Development (1973–1977 and 1989–1998). In 1992, his criticism of the Indonesian government’s record on human rights caused that government to refuse development aid from the Netherlands. In 2015, in a speech at a public seminar preceding the International People’s Tribunal 1965, Pronk suggested several reasons for why the official Dutch position at the time of the ‘events ’ of 1965 in Indonesia was one of silence. He argued that politicians and opinion-makers did not feel at ease with the crimes that the Dutch state had committed during more than two centuries as colonizers, nor did they want to draw attention to the military war crimes of the 1940s. During the 1960s, and later, the authorities in the Netherlands were careful not to blame military veterans (see also Chapter 3 on how this mattered in 2015). After a complicated decolonization period, the Dutch saw an opportunity to improve Dutch commercial interests by establishing good relations with the new regime. Silence about human rights abuses, Pronk explains, was the solution (Pronk, 2015). If we want to understand the denials of moral and political responsibility at a collective level, and the everyday and organized resistances against these denials, then we need to be able to grasp the complexities of notions of silence and denial. Importantly, this also requires us to take an interest in the denials and resistance to denials of various categories of victims and perpetrators, as well as observers or bystanders. This last category is often marginalized in discussions about transitional justice and memory politics (but see Cohen, 2001; Rothberg, 2019). (Transnational) activists can challenge the silence of governments in relation to human-rights abuses. Narratives can be used to make sense of how this past matters, or should matter, in the present and the future. Is there, for example, a time after the transition to peace when it is no longer necessary to address the past, since justice has been obtained? Moreover, according to whom has justice been obtained? Silences about politically sensitive memories in collective narratives occur at both the interpersonal and the societal levels. Counter-narratives to state-friendly interpretations of history can lead to struggles over the inclusion or exclusion of the memories of marginalized groups within a society in national narratives

10

P. STOLTZ

about the past. Over time, transnational and global political, legal and social processes influence these memories (see Erll, 2011; Hirsch, 1997, 2012; Rothberg, 2009; Trouillot, 1995).

1.3

Power, Resistance and Narrative Struggles

Individual and collective memories (just like individual and collective narratives) are related to each other (see Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2008; Halbwachs, 1992). There are struggles over narratives of memories in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. (It was his war, not mine. Not yet. [Het was zijn oorlog, niet de mijne. Nog niet.]) This quote is from the novel The Interpreter from Java by Alfred Birney (Birney, 2016, p. 278, transl. PS), which I will analyse in Chapter 5. The war concerns the war for Indonesian independence and the ‘I’ character is here contemplating the transnational memories of his mixed-race father, who appears to have been involved in the use of excessive forms of violence during this war. In the novel, Birney describes and discusses how some, as opposed to other, narratives of memories are powerful and hegemonic in the Netherlands. Counter-narratives about Dutch perpetrators, human rights abuses or excessive uses of violence that are in need of attention are rather marginalized. As in other former colonial societies, hegemonic narratives in the Netherlands include postcolonial nostalgia, and narrative struggles concern legal and political as well as other paths to addressing historical injustices. One focus of this study is the resistances —the counter-narratives to hegemonic narratives—in narrative struggles over the memories of the violent conflicts that took place in Indonesia. I am concerned with these resistances in both the Netherlands and Indonesia, as they take place in transnational space. Hegemonic national narratives of the war of independence differ depending upon whether we are in the Netherlands, which lost this war, or amongst the winners in Indonesia (see Olick, 2016, p. 45). In both cases, the legal and political dimensions of these national narratives can influence the politics of contemporary Dutch–Indonesian international relations. Their respective politics of belonging also influence the senses of belonging of individual citizens, postcolonial migrants and refugees (see Yuval-Davis, 2011 on the politics of belonging). These migrants and refugees are thus able to resist such issues as misrecognition. It is noteworthy that struggles over narratives of memories of violent conflicts are

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

11

not only national struggles, because they can also involve transnational memories . These travel abroad with politicians as well as with postcolonial migrants and refugees (see Assmann, 2014). In addition, these respective national narrative struggles relate to human rights struggles. Thus, in this transnational context, narrative struggles about what is appropriate behaviour after violent conflicts are also of interest. Narrative struggles about traumatic events involve unequal power relations. Power and resistance relate to each other, in that those in power may meet resistance and those with less power can counter the narratives of the powerful. We can find narrative representations of experiences of trauma in policies on reconciliation, in legislation on truth-telling and truth commissions, as well as in demonstrations, documentary films, museums and, my focus in this study, novels. Power is enacted in the gap between experiences of trauma on the one hand, and how trauma then takes representational shape on the other; or, in other words, between the embodiment of emotions about trauma and the strategies that are available to different actors to express their experiences of trauma (Hutchison, 2016, pp. 12–13). There are multiple narratives and representations of the traumatic events that took place during the three conflicts in Indonesia (see Rothberg, 2009; Shenhav, 2015). In order to understand these narrative struggles and the inequalities in power and resistances to denial that characterize them, I emphasize the importance of focusing on notions of identity, agency, time, place and space. Narratives change over time, and this notion is important for our understanding of knowledge-based strategies for political change in relation to the present and future of the gendered consequences of the conflicts (Gutman, 2017). Notions of place and space are also important, in that the context in which narratives are produced can be either the Netherlands or Indonesia, and their reception can be in both places as well as elsewhere. Space becomes important in the context of what happens between these places: the transnational travelling of memories. By stressing the particular role of the travelling of traumatic memories of violent conflicts (Erll, 2011), I challenge methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) and memory constructions that remain at national levels in understandings of these conflicts. By doing this, I emphasize the importance of including processes not only of nationalism (and how it relates to nation-building and welfare-state building), but also of transnationalism and globalization in the study of post-conflict

12

P. STOLTZ

processes and the intersectional dimensions of politics of belonging (see Yuval-Davis, 2011, esp. Chapters 3 on nationalism and 5 on human rights). Consequently, in order to investigate my central topic—how gender and resistances to silences and denials are relevant in personal, social and strategic narratives of transnational memories of the three violent conflicts in Indonesia (1942–2015)—I pay special attention to notions of identity, agency, time and place/space. The research questions guiding my narrative analysis of the novels are as follows: 1. A question about identity: who are the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in the narratives? Does the main character in the novel describe power relations within events and contexts in the past? If so, according to which categories? Does the main character highlight tensions between individual and collective identities? 2. An empirical question about time and place: what do ‘we’ know about the past? Related to this is the epistemological question about time and place: how do ‘we’ know what we know about the past? Does the main character express imaginary or hypothetical experiences, e.g. in relation to power relations, events and contexts in the past, the present and/or the future? 3. A normative question about time, place, space and agency: what do ‘we’ think of the past, present and future? Does the main character pass moral judgement on events and contexts in the past and/or relate this to strategies to obtain justice and equality in the present and/or the future? I analyse four novels, two of which were originally published in the Netherlands and two in Indonesia. The Dutch novels are: Indische duinen (Dutch original 1994, English translation: My Father’s War, 2004) by Adriaan van Dis, and De tolk van Java (Dutch original; the title can be translated as The Interpreter from Java) by Alfred Birney (2016). The Indonesian novels are Durga/Umayi (Indonesian original 1991; English translation with the same title, 2004) by Y. B. Mangunwijaya and Pulang (Indonesian original 2012, English translation: Home, 2015) by Leila S. Chudori. I use the Dutch versions of the Dutch novels and the English versions of the Indonesian novels.

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

13

The context for narrative struggles and politics of memory and emotion differed between the years of publication of the novels. Two of them came out in the 1990s. This meant that the Indonesian novel is from a period of authoritarian rule, whereas the Dutch novel is not. The other two novels are from the 2010s. By this time, Indonesia had returned to democratic rule. In both cases, global norms about how to deal with the past had emerged and influenced post-conflict transformations in the ways that were described as windows of opportunity above. There is a long tradition of fiction about the colonial period in Indonesia written in Dutch, dating back to the nineteenth century (Couperus, 1900; Du Perron, 1935; Multatuli, 1860). Equally, there is a tradition of writing about postcolonial migration to the Netherlands after Indonesian independence (see, e.g., Bloem, 1983; Dermoût, 1955; Gomes, 1975; Haasse, 1948, 1992; Springer, 1993; van Dis, 1994). The theme of violence, let alone mass violence and human rights abuses, mostly remains in the background of these narratives. This makes it even more remarkable that all four novels address social change and questions of reconciliation, and all relate to silences and denials at both individual and collective levels. All four novels also address gender and resistance to historical injustices by engaging with transnational aspects of memories of violent conflicts. The study engages with different types of narratives. I study these by means of both a thick and a thin analysis. Novels are good sources of understanding for historical events and contexts, especially in cases of stories of denial and silence in relation to historical injustices. The central focus of this study is the thick narrative analysis of two Dutch and two Indonesian novels. The largely biographical narratives within these novels tell the big and small stories of memories of events and experiences of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies (1942–1945), the Indonesian war of independence from the Netherlands (1945–1949) and the mass violence used against (alleged) communists in Indonesia during the course of the military coup d’état in 1965 (on big and small stories see Freeman, 2011). The thin analysis concerns the social (Shenhav, 2015) and strategic (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2013, 2017; Roselle, Miskimmon, & O’Loughlin, 2014) narratives of political, legal and social elites and activists in politics, law and the media. I will use this thin analysis in particular to enable a discussion of the link between individual and collective memories of conflicts, of the (lack of) transnational relations between the social narratives (Shenhav, 2015) of the Netherlands and Indonesia

14

P. STOLTZ

and of the role of observers outside of these national contexts. In other words, this approach also enables me to think about how these openended national narrative struggles are engaged in wider global narrative struggles over how global society should deal with historical injustices and post-conflict transformations.

1.4

Overview of the Book

The research fields of transitional justice and memory politics are useful if we want to solve the political puzzle of why the silences and denials that relate to the memories of violent conflicts in Indonesia continue, despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice. In Chapter 2, I explain how innovative transnational and gender perspectives, such as those found in postcolonial and feminist research, can address the limitations resulting from the assumptions about power relations and globalization in these research fields. I combine theoretical understandings of gender and globalization with theories about resistance, including how resistance relates to the political dynamics of emotions and emotional agency after trauma. I end by developing my approach to the analysis of personal, strategic and social narratives. Chapter 3 introduces the background to the narratives about memories of the three interrelated violent conflicts that I analyse in the following chapters. I situate the three conflicts and the related memory struggles in time, place and space by providing political and legal contexts to the relevant events between 1942 and 2015. Transitional justice aims to give voice to victims and is concerned with redress for past wrongdoings. Successive Indonesian and Dutch governments have contested global transitional justice norms, or have been reluctant to introduce relevant measures to address the historical injustices related to these violent conflicts. Resistance to these denials of moral and political responsibility has frequently recurred over the years, and intensified in both Indonesia and the Netherlands during commemorations of the conflicts in 2015. In Chapters 4–7, I analyse everyday resistance to denials and silences around social inequalities and historical injustices as narrated in the four novels (see especially Chapters 4 and 5). Where and when appropriate, I also consider organized resistance (see especially Chapter 7). The transnational dynamics of memories of violence are important if we want to understand the relationships between categories of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and observers. I argue that we need to take seriously the

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

15

politics of location, because transnational memories are both local and transnational in character. Gender, intersectional and queer approaches are helpful if we want to understand silence, denial and resistance in transnational dynamics or memories of violence, since they focus on unequal power relations. If we want to understand why denials of political responsibility continue, then we need to investigate the links between silence, voice and agency. As already discussed, these links are more complicated than an assumption that silence is ‘bad’ and having a voice is ‘good’. In Chapter 4, I argue that combining intersectional analysis of inequalities with queer approaches to diaspora can be useful in the study of how these notions relate in narratives of transnational memories of violence. I illustrate the argument with examples from the Dutch novel Indische duinen [My Father’s War] by Adriaan van Dis (1994, 2004). The results show how the use of simplistic understandings of the different characters as either victims or perpetrators influences the formation of their respective diasporic identities. Moreover, intersectional inequalities hinder the agency of both first and subsequent generations of postcolonial migrants and their ability to resist denials of responsibility. The transnational dynamics of memories of violence are an important focus if we want to understand the constraints placed upon gendered resistances to denials of responsibility. In Chapter 5, I argue that it is fruitful to combine postcolonial and intersectional perspectives with the concept of hegemonic masculinities and with a methodological intervention into narratives of transnational memories in order to take seriously the politics of location, if we want to study the constraints on resistances to denials. I show how such transnational dynamics influence the ability of male postcolonial migrants from different generations to resist hegemonic projects of masculinity, Eurocentrism and racism as well as silences about possible historical injustices by using examples from the Dutch novel De tolk van Java [The Interpreter from Java] by Alfred Birney (2016). The results show how the relationships between male postcolonial migrants from different generations include roles as victims, perpetrators and bystanders in unclear ways and indicate tensions between individual and collective (national) identities. Hegemonic masculinities, intersectionality and transnationalism complicate such relationships, but I argue that, by combining these theoretical approaches, we gain greater insight into how the father/son relationship in the novel moves across time, place and space and what influences their respective agency.

16

P. STOLTZ

How is it possible to re-imagine national identity and nation-building during post-conflict transformations without reinforcing inequalities and injustices? In Chapter 6, I discuss denials of political and moral responsibility in narratives about national identity and nation-building in postindependence Indonesia, with a focus on the genocide of 1965. I challenge research that uses binaries to explain genocide in relation to notions of gender and sexuality and suggest that combining approaches from feminist transitional justice, critical genocide studies and queer theory can better explain the genocide, including its long-time emergence and aftermath. Genocide studies—as part of transitional justice studies—often uses binaries between victims and perpetrators to explain instances of national identity formation and Othering during genocide (see Feierstein, 2014). Gender approaches to genocide and transitional justice tend to focus on binaries between women and men, often with a limited thematic content of women as victims of sexual violence and men as perpetrators (see Björkdahl & Mannergren Selimovic, 2017; Buckley-Zistel & Stanley, 2012). Other approaches taken by feminist transitional justice and critical genocide studies uncover the limitations inherent in the uses of such binaries (Feierstein, 2014; Rooney & Ní Aoláin, 2018). Following this lead, I suggest that it is more useful to combine these last two approaches with queer approaches (Richter-Montpetit, 2018; Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017), since all three provide alternative ways of thinking. Importantly, the results contribute to considerations of how to avoid the reinforcement of structural dimensions of marginalization in transitional justice. I illustrate my argument with examples from the Indonesian novel Durga/Umayi by Y. B. Mangunwijaya (1991). In Chapter 7, I consider why observers and bystanders around the world looked on during the atrocities in Indonesia in 1965, without ‘doing anything’ about the human rights abuses that were committed. Why this lack of interest and these denials of moral and political responsibility? Relatedly, we can wonder about how feelings of outrage about the memories of this violence influenced (transnational) activists to hope for change by resisting such denial. I suggest that the solution to the political puzzle in this study—why the silences and denials relating to the memories of violent conflicts in Indonesia continue, despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice—requires us to pay attention to the transnational affective relations between victims and perpetrators, as well as observers. Using the notion of implicated subjects, I argue for the importance of an intersectional approach in order to avoid universalizing

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

17

the categories of victims, perpetrators and observers. Next, I develop the complexities of the notion of denial in order to avoid the universalizing of emotions and feelings at individual and collective levels. I use ideas about affective dissonance to discuss gender and resistance to denials in transnational affective relations. Finally, I address how the results are relevant to transitional justice research, discourses, norms, measures and strategies and to research on the politics of memory and activism. I illustrate the argument with examples from the Indonesian novel Pulang [Home] by Leila S. Chudori (2012). Empirically, the analysis of the four novels fills a knowledge gap about memories of gender and the uses of mass violence by the Dutch and Indonesian militaries. By engaging in notions of agency (gender and related categories), time (past, present and future) and place/space (migration, individual and collective narratives, a local–global nexus of activism and politics), I show how the analysis of the four novels provides a much-needed focus on marginalized, gendered voices. I argue that these voices in the transnational memories of historical injustices in the separate novels—as well as in all four together—challenge the lack of change or mobility in the open-ended social narratives of both societies and enable a better understanding of the dynamics of memories in transnational space. The results of the study encourage new perceptions of present problems with these memories in transitional justice settings and also project alternative solutions for the future.

References Andrews, M. (2003). Grand national narratives and the project of truth commissions: A comparative analysis. Media, Culture and Society, 25(1), 45–65. Andrews, M., Squire, C., & Tamboukou, M. (Eds.). (2008). Doing narrative research. London: Sage. Assmann, A. (2014). Transnational memories. European Review, 22(4), 546–556. Assmann, A., & Conrad, S. (Eds.). (2010). Memory in a global age: Discourses, practices and trajectories. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Björkdahl, A., & Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2017). Gender and transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 69–90). London: Routledge. Buckley-Zistel, S., Koloma Beck, T., Braun, C., & Mieth, F. (Eds.). (2014). Transitional justice theories. New York: Routledge. Buckley-Zistel, S., & Stanley, R. (2012). Gender in transitional justice. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

18

P. STOLTZ

Chakrabarty, D. (2008). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chandra, S. (2017). New findings on the Indonesian killings of 1965–66. The Journal of Asian Studies, 76(4), 1059–1086. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cribb, R. (1991). Gangsters and revolutionaries: The Jakarta People’s Militia and the Indonesian revolution 1945–1949. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Cribb, R. (2010). Digital atlas of Indonesian history. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Erll, A. (2011). Travelling memory. Parallax, 17 (4), 4–18. Evanty, N., & Pohlman, A. (2018). After 1965: Legal matters for justice? In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 311–334). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Feierstein, D. (2014). Beyond the binary model: National security doctrine in Argentina as a way of rethinking genocide as a social practice. In A. L. Hinton, T. La Pointe, & D. Irvin-Erickson (Eds.), Hidden genocides: Power, knowledge, memory (pp. 68–80). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Freeman, M. (2011). Stories, big and small: Toward a synthesis. Theory & Psychology, 21(1), 114–121. Guha, R. (1998). Dominance without hegemony: History and power in colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutman, Y. (2017). Looking backward to the future: Counter-memory as oppositional knowledge production in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Current Sociology, 65(1), 54–72. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: Photography, narrative and postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hutchison, E. (2016). Affective communities in world politics: Collective emotions after trauma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. IPT 1965 Foundation. (2016). Final report of the IPT 1965: Findings and documents of the International People’s Tribunal on crimes against humanity in Indonesia 1965. The Hague and Jakarta: IPT 1965 Foundation. Jaffe, R. (2018). Reflections: A conversation with Gloria Wekker. Development and Change, 49(2), 547–560.

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

19

Kolimon, M., Wetangterah, L., & Campbell-Nelson, K. (Eds.). (2015). Forbidden memories: Women’s experience of 1965 in Eastern Indonesia. Melbourne, VIC: Monash University Publishing. Krishna, S. (2009). Globalization and postcolonialism: Hegemony and resistance in the twenty-first century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lilja, M., Baaz, M., Schulz, M., & Vinthagen, S. (2017). How resistance encourages resistance: Theorizing the nexus between power, ‘organised resistance’ and ‘everyday resistance’. Journal of Political Power, 10(1), 40–54. Limpach, R. (2016). De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor [The burning kampongs of General Spoor]. Amsterdam: Boom. McGregor, K. (2016). Emotions and activism for former so-called ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies. Women’s Studies International Forum, 54, 67–78. McGregor, K., & Mackie, V. (2018). Transcultural memory and the troostmeisjes/ comfort women photographic project. History & Memory, 30(1), 116–150. McGregor, K., Melvin, J., & Pohlman, A. (Eds.). (2018). The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Melvin, J., & Pohlman, A. (2018). A case for genocide: Indonesia, 1965–1966. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 27–50). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Mihr, A. (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 1–28). London: Routledge. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2013). Strategic narratives: Communication power and the new world order. London: Routledge. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (Eds.). (2017). Forging the world: Strategic narratives and international relations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2002). ‘Under Western eyes’ revisited. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(2), 499–535. Olick, J. K. (2016). Sites of memory studies [Lieux des études des mémoire]. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 41–52). London: Routledge. Oostindie, G. (2015). Soldaat in Indonesië 1945–1950. Getuigenissen van een oorlog aan de verkeerde kant van de geschiedenis [Soldier in Indonesia 1945–1950: Testimonies of a war on the wrong side of history]. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Parpart, J., & Parashar, S. (Eds.). (2018). Rethinking silence, voice and agency in contested gendered terrains: Beyond the binary. London: Routledge.

20

P. STOLTZ

Pattynama, P. (2014). Bitterzoet Indië. Herinnering en nostalgie in literatuur, foto’s en films [Bittersweet Dutch East Indies. Memory and nostalgia in literature, photos and films]. Amsterdam: Prometheus & Bert Bakker. Pedwell, C. (2014). Affective relations: The transnational politics of empathy. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pohlman, A. (2015). Women, sexual violence and the Indonesian killings of 1965–1966. London: Routledge. Pronk, J. (2015, April 10). An inconvenient relation. Speech by Jan Pronk during the Public Seminar, International People’s Tribunal 1965: Indonesia’s 1965 Massacre. Unveiling the Truth, Demanding Justice. Nieuwe Kerk, The Hague. Accessed from http://1965tribunal.org/an-inconvenient-relation/. Downloaded 16 August 2015. Purdey, J. (2018). Epilogue. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 357–366). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Reading, A. (2011). Identity, memory and cosmopolitanism: The otherness of the past and a right to memory? European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(4), 379–394. Reading, A. (2016). Gender and memory in the globital age. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Richter-Montpetit, M. (2018). Everything you always wanted to know about sex (in IR) but were afraid to ask: The ‘queer turn’ in international relations. Millennium, 46(2), 220–240. Richter-Montpetit, M., & Weber, C. (2017). Queer international relations. In Oxford research encyclopedia of politics (pp. 1–40). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rigney, A. (2012). Reconciliation and remembering: (How) does it work? Memory Studies, 5(3), 251–258. Rooney, E., & Ní Aoláin, F. (2018). Transitional justice from the margins: Intersections of identities, power and human rights. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 12, 1–8. Roselle, L., Miskimmon, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2014). Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power. Media, War & Conflict, 7 (1), 70–84. Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, M. (2019). The implicated subject: Beyond victims and perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shenhav, S. R. (2015). Analyzing social narratives. London: Routledge. Simic, O. (Ed.). (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. London: Routledge.

1

INTRODUCTION: GENDER, RESISTANCE …

21

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Tota, A. L., & Hagen, T. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge international handbook of memory studies. London: Routledge. Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Van den Herik, L. (2012). Addressing ‘colonial crimes’ through reparations? Journal of International Criminal Justice, 10(3), 693–705. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wieringa, S. (2002). Sexual politics in Indonesia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wieringa, S. (2003). The birth of the new order state in Indonesia: Sexual politics and nationalism. Journal of Women’s History, 15(1), 70–91 & 240. Wieringa, S. (2006). Postcolonial amnesia in Indonesia and Southern Africa and the women’s/sexual rights discourse. New Delhi: Sangat, Kartini and Jagori. Wieringa, S., & Katjasungkana, N. (2019). Propaganda and the genocide in Indonesia: Imagined evil. New York, NY: Routledge. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2(4), 301–334. Winter, S. (2014). Transitional justice in established democracies: A political theory. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage.

Novels Birney, A. (2016). De tolk van Java [The interpreter from Java]. Amsterdam: De Geus. Bloem, M. (1983). Geen gewoon Indisch meisje [No ordinary Indisch girl]. Amsterdam: Maarten Muntinga. Chudori, L. (2012). Pulang [Home]. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia. Chudori, L. (2015). Home (Indonesian original, Pulang, 2012). Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum Publishing. Couperus, L. (1900/1994). De stille kracht [The silent power]. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact. Dermoût, M. (1955/1980). De tienduizend dingen [The ten thousand things]. Amsterdam: Querido. Du Perron, E. (1935). Het land van herkomst [The country of origin]. Amsterdam: G. A. van Oorschot.

22

P. STOLTZ

Gomes, P. (1975). Sudah, laat maar [Sudah, never mind]. Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij (first print); In Gomes, P. (2004). Tropenkind [Tropical child]. Den Haag: Van Stockum (second, revised print). Haasse, H. (1948). Oeroeg. Amsterdam: Querido. Haasse, H. (1992). De heren van de thee [The gentlemen of the tea trade]. Amsterdam: Querido. Mangunwijaya, Y. B. (1991). Durga/Umayi. Jakarta: Grafiti. Mangunwijaya, Y. B. (2004). Durga/Umayi (Indonesian original, Durga/Umayi, 1991). Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Singapore University Press. Multatuli. (1860/1958). Max Havelaar of de koffieveilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij [Max Havelaar or the coffee auctions of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij]. Antwerpen: Ontwikkelingen. Springer, F. (1993). Bandoeng-Bandung. Amsterdam: Querido. van Dis, A. (1994). Indische duinen [Indisch dunes]. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. van Dis, A. (2004). My father’s war (Dutch original, Indische duinen, 1994) (I. Rilke, Trans.). London: William Heinemann.

CHAPTER 2

Globalization, Intersectional Inequalities and Narrative Struggles

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, globalization processes have taken place that have resonated with studies of memories of violent conflicts and transitional justice. They have provided these research fields with assumptions, but also with challenges to assumptions. In this chapter I argue that, if we acknowledge the importance of the nexus between the local and the global, then we need to pay special attention to the existence of inequalities of power in narrative struggles over memories of violent conflicts and to the agency of the assumed ‘recipients’ of global norms of transitional justice. I understand a norm as a standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity (Katzenstein, 1996, p. 5). Consequently, in this chapter, I explain the usefulness of postcolonial perspectives to the intersecting research fields of memory politics and transitional justice. Postcolonial perspectives can help me to position those who are on the margins of post-conflict processes at the centre of attention. They help me to analyse the influences of transnational and global processes of colonialism and postcolonial migration and hegemonic processes of Eurocentrism upon (transnational) memories of violent conflicts (Chakrabarty, 2008; Guha, 1998; Krishna, 2009; Mohanty, 2002; Spivak, 1988). This does not mean that I reject norms of human rights or transitional justice. Rather, following the feminist theories on norm translation described by Zwingel (2016), I find it important to address strategies of norm translation and appropriation as well as contestation and resistance when considering transitional justice mechanisms. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_2

23

24

P. STOLTZ

Inequalities are central when analysing memories of war and colonialism and can concern inequalities of gender as well as related categories of ‘race’, class, nationality, generation, sexuality and the infamous ‘etcetera’. Consequently, I explain how postcolonial and Black feminists have highlighted the usefulness of an intersectional approach in the study of inequalities. Intersectional inequalities influence the agency and sense of belonging of individuals. They also influence who can (and who cannot) have a voice in struggles over collective memories of colonialism and war, or what Yuval-Davis in her approach to intersectionality calls the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011; see also Crenshaw, 1989; Hancock 2016; Hill Collins, 2015). In this study, I will use intersectional and other gender approaches to inequalities to address the uneven playing field upon which narrative struggles over memories, including global dialogues on transitional justice, take place. This brings me in the last part of the chapter to introduce my approach to narrative analysis in this study.

2.1

Transitional Justice

Let me start by introducing the research fields of transitional justice. One way of defining transitional justice, following Teitel, is to understand it as the conception of justice associated with periods of political change (transition). We can characterize this conception by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes (Teitel, 2003, p. 69). This is a narrow definition, with an emphasis on law and politics. Another definition, coined by Buckley-Zistel, Koloma Beck, Braun and Mieth, refers to transitional justice as ‘an umbrella term for approaches to deal with the past in the aftermath of violent conflict or dictatorial regimes’ (Buckley-Zistel, Koloma Beck, Braun, & Mieth, 2014, p. 1). This broad (and therefore rather vague) definition acknowledges the observation that there is not only one theory of transitional justice, but rather many and diverse approaches to conceptualizing the phenomenon. These can at times be in tension with each other. Different disciplinary perspectives lead to particular foci of research (such as in the definition by Teitel, above) and the objectives of the research and its epistemological or ethical stance are important, because they reflect how researchers bring different experiences, interests and sets of values into the analysis of justice during times of transition (Buckley-Zistel et al., 2014, p. 4). A third definition is given by Mihr, who understands transitional justice as: ‘a concept and a process that encompasses a number of different legal,

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

25

political and cultural instruments and mechanisms that can strengthen, weaken, enhance or accelerate processes of regime change and consolidation’ (Mihr, 2017, p. 1). This holistic definition is more useful in the context of my study. By pointing out that the instruments and mechanisms will not necessarily imply that the processes have positive results, it is possible to understand transitional justice in a more complex manner (see Dube, 2011). Regime change and consolidation are not the only ways to describe the aims and outcomes of transitional justice. De Greiff (2012) suggests others to be, for example, recognition, civic trust, reconciliation and democracy. Defining and measuring concepts such as reconciliation and democracy is difficult (Reiter, 2017) but, as Mihr is careful to point out, transitional justice measures are generally used to delegitimize a past regime and to legitimize a new one. However, no transformation process after a violent conflict will depend only upon such measures. Rather, they are complementary to other socio-economic reforms. The political will and ambitions of the actors involved are central in this context (Mihr, 2017, p. 22). Moreover, this definition provides the possibility of overlap with definitions of memory politics (see below) in that it acknowledges the relevance of cultural aspects and thereby opens up the possibility to use novels as a source of knowledge. Implicit assumptions about transition and/or justice provide the basis for discourses and practices of transitional justice. These assumptions are often quite common-sense ones in Western thinking, since particular historical experiences have influenced them. These range from the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after WWII, the transitions of South American countries from dictatorship to democracy, international criminal tribunals such as for Rwanda, to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa (Buckley-Zistel et al., 2014, p. 1). One assumption is that transitional justice has become an emerging global norm. Many researchers and practitioners understand mechanisms of transitional justice to be an international or global set of practices and ideas (BuckleyZistel et al., 2014). Researchers such as Teitel argue that, nowadays, we cannot conceive of transitional justice as a local or national response to past abuses or as a specific form of justice influenced by a state’s own political context. Rather, transitional justice discourse has a global normative reach that has effects on international affairs in unprecedented ways (Teitel, 2014). There are limitations to this global norm. Critics have pointed out that these primarily relate to inequalities of power. For example, Nagy

26

P. STOLTZ

has noted that, in the determination of who is accountable for what and when, we can observe power relations in transitional justice discourse and practice, which create problematic silences and denials. A narrow, legalistic focus on gross violations of civil and political rights, for example, overlooks the ways in which structural violence and gender inequality inform subjective experiences of political conflict, injustice and their consequences (Nagy, 2008; see Bell & O’Rourke, 2007; Brown & Ní Aoláin, 2015; Ní Aoláin, 2012). In addition, feminist critics have pointed out how little gender analysis and women’s issues have entered into the discursive fray during the emergence of transitional justice discourses (Bell & O’Rourke, 2007; Ní Aoláin, 2012). Critics who view transitional justice from a local perspective point out another limitation. They ask how researchers and practitioners with an interest in global norms of transitional justice can productively engage in local contexts and wonder how to open up or recognize the spaces needed for grassroots change. According to this research, assumptions about justice, truth and reconciliation can look different in different parts of the world (Hinton, 2010; Kent, 2012; McEvoy & McGregor, 2008; Shaw & Waldorf, with Hazan, 2010). This focus on the local also dovetails with feminist calls to pay attention to the everyday and to places in which power and experience are located for women (Brown & Ní Aoláin, 2015). Additionally, it returns the focus to cultural mechanisms of transitional justice, which can include the arts by means of novels, such as in this study, as well as the use of photo exhibitions, films and memorials and the use of ‘indigenous’ norms, ‘traditional’ mechanisms and healing rituals (see Simic, 2017). In order to get a better grip on these limitations, I distinguish between three levels of analysis when we discuss transitional justice norms and mechanisms. They follow Reiter’s suggestion about the levels at which transitional justice can be evaluated: (1) The micro or individual level of recognition, reparation and reconciliation. This focuses on the lives of victims and perpetrators, and concerns itself with questions such as how different groups in society perceive victims and perpetrators, and the extent to which they alter their views. (2) The meso or institutional level, focusing on institutional assessments of specific mechanisms to obtain justice, truth and reform. This includes courts, truth commissions and reparation programmes. (3) The macro or national/global level of peace, democracy and human rights, focusing on questions such as whether particular choices

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

27

of mechanisms correlate with long-term success on measures of democracy and human rights. This includes whether there are global trends or new norms that are successful in improving democracy and human rights (Reiter, 2017). I will return to these levels below, in my introductions to memory politics and narrative analysis. Importantly, I will mainly address the diffusion and translation of norms in the background to this study (see especially Chapter 3). Here, I am particularly concerned with norm translation research, which raises questions about the translation of global norms of transitional justice, including norms related to gender, peace and security (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998; Shepherd, 2011; Zwingel, 2016, 2017). An approach to norms such as translation, following Zwingel (2016, 2017), can reveal strategies of norm appropriation as well as of resistance to and contestation of norms. This is useful in relation to the focus of this study, which is on the political strategies that individuals and groups in Indonesia and the Netherlands have developed in order to resist silences and address denials of responsibility by governments and other political actors so as to obtain justice and equality. A norm-translation approach is sensitive to the ways in which norms strengthen, weaken, enhance or accelerate processes of transitional justice (see the definition of transitional justice given by Mihr, above). It does so by opening up space for a move from international to transnational processes in the study of global norms and by enabling an analysis of the dynamic character and multidirectional spread of norms (bottom-up, top-down, transnational, NorthSouth, South-North, South-South), instead of an assumption that the international core sends norms towards domestic receiving ends. That is, a norm-translation approach concerns a reconceptualization of how the global, national and local relate to each other, and an assumption about non-linear processes of negotiation involving differently contextualized actors. These actors might be positive or negative about global norms (see Dube, 2011). A complex understanding of norm translation also enables a focus on the strategies of actors other than states, such as activists and novelists, who are part of a contested struggle over the meaning of the past (see Eyerman, 2016). This is useful in the context of my focus on gender and resistance.

28

P. STOLTZ

2.2

Memory Politics

In the study of memory and the politics of memory, I distinguish between individual , collective and historical memory. Here, I follow Halbwachs (1992), who in his seminal work on collective memory understands historical memory as memories that reach social actors by means of written records, or other types of records, such as photographs. These records need some kind of commemoration by social actors to keep them alive (see Coser in Halbwachs, 1992, pp. 23–29). Here, Halbwachs relates individual and collective memories to each other. Whereas he relates individual or biographical memory to what individuals know, believe and feel about themselves at earlier times in their lives, he understands collective memory as the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe and feel about the past. This includes how they judge the past morally, how closely they identify with it, and how much collective memories inspire individuals as a model for their conduct and identity. This means that individual memories are the fundamental units of collective memory (Halbwachs, 1992; Schwartz, 2016, pp. 10–12). Commemoration means that social actors distinguish between events and persons worthy of celebration and those events and persons whom they do not consider to deserve this, or who deserve mere remembrance without celebration (Schwartz, 2016, pp. 10–12). Struggles over commemoration emphasize the socially constructive as well as the political dimensions of memory. That is why it is also relevant to talk about the politics of memory. Memory studies work from the assumption that different nations remember different historical events, just as different groups in them, or across them, remember different events or remember the same events differently (Olick, 2016, p. 45). However, similar to trends in transitional justice, memory scholars such as Levy and Sznaider (2002) and Rothberg (2009) have argued that we have recently witnessed the globalization or universalization of memory (see Inglis, 2016 for an overview of memory and globalization). Notably, memories of the Holocaust have become a public good that people around the world can interpret in different ways. Levy and Sznaider (2002) argue that the distinctive forms that these collective memories take in the age of globalization demonstrate a transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. We can understand assumptions about memory and globalization in light of my comments above about transitional justice, the emergence of

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

29

global trends or norms in relation to how to deal with historical injustices and the global, macro level of analyses of peace, democracy and human rights. In addition, as with transitional justice, there are multiple pathways along which to approach the study of memory. If political and legal perspectives provide the foundations for the field of transitional justice, then the foundations of the field of memory studies lie in sociological, psychological, historical and cultural perspectives. We can characterize both research fields as interdisciplinary beyond the disciplines mentioned. These disciplines, in turn, provide diverse vocabularies and methodologies, and in memory studies (as in transitional justice), we can recognize differences in the levels (micro, meso, macro, national, international, transnational) at which research is situated (see Tota & Hagen, 2016, p. 2). Overcoming ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) and assumptions about the globalization of memory have led to an emerging trend in the field of Memory Studies towards studying memory beyond national borders (see also Assmann & Conrad, 2010; De Cesari & Rigney, 2014; Gutman, Brown, & Sodaro, 2010). Astrid Erll asks us to assume ‘…that memory is first and foremost not bound to the frame of a place, a region, a social group, a religious community, or a nation, but truly transcultural, continually moving across and beyond such territorial and social borders’ (Erll, 2011, p. 10). She suggests that this ‘travelling ’ of memories can best be understood as the continuous wandering of carriers, media, content, forms and practices of memory, and their ongoing transformations through time and space and across social, linguistic and political borders. By carriers of memory, she means the individuals who share collective images and narratives of the past and who can, for example, draw upon repertoires of knowledge about them. Migration, flight and various forms of diaspora lead to the diffusion of these memories across the globe (Erll, 2011, pp. 11–12). In this study, I understand the ‘travelling ’ of memories as consisting of the memories of violent conflicts (the content), which are carried by postcolonial migrants (the carriers) through the medium of the novel. They are also carried by politicians and other actors who are involved in narratives about human rights and transitional justice. Studies of transnational memories and the notion of space are central in this context. Limitations imposed by an overly optimistic interpretation of globalization and transnational processes as always positive have also, in this case, led scholars to point out that inequalities of power can influence

30

P. STOLTZ

which memories can receive hegemonic status in societies and which cannot (Assmann & Conrad, 2010; De Cesari & Rigney, 2014; Erll, 2011; Gutman et al., 2010). Even if memories do travel, then I argue, following these scholars and Halbwachs’ ideas about the role of commemoration in collective memory, that what we choose to remember and tell each other about, for example, a war, is linked to the place and time where it happened or where we imagine that it happened. That is, past atrocities are spatially grounded, and both place and space matter. Memories about them might travel, but individuals or societies also receive memories locally. Some narratives of memories have the power to transcend national boundaries, while others do not. Some individual and institutional actors manage to form those narratives into a successful representation, while others are unsuccessful (Sierp & Wüstenberg, 2015). The locality of the transnational memories of the three violent conflicts in Indonesia which are discussed in the novels in this study differ depending upon whether we are talking about Indonesia, the Netherlands or other parts of the world, and also depending upon the time period that is in focus. The possibility for individual novelists, filmmakers, activists or others to access the social domain is important in these cases of silences, denials and resistances in relation to historical injustices, as is the (in)tolerance of societies to new narrators and narratives (see Shenhav, 2015, pp. 74–77; see also below on my approach to narratives). This includes, as I mentioned above, a certain lack of tolerance for narratives on gendered aspects of memories of violent conflicts in the nexus between the local and the global. It would be a mistake to ignore the significance of the locality of memories in the transnational ‘travelling ’ of memories and rather ask, following Sierp and Wüstenberg: how can we take seriously both the local and the transnational processes of memory politics? Through what complex ways are they linked and in what ways do they shape one another? Theoretically, there is a challenge in analysing and theorizing how something that depends on concrete places and times (such as the experiences of veterans or war victims explored in Chapters 4 and 5) is shaped by global processes and to understand how the local moulds the global (Sierp & Wüstenberg, 2015; see also Radstone, 2011; Rothberg, 2014).

2

2.3

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

31

Gender and Transnational Approaches

Approaches to transitional justice that include the study of norm translation, and approaches to memory studies that include the study of transnational memories, are both useful if we want to understand the legacies of injustice and inequality in contemporary projects of denial. I will use a norm-translation approach to transitional justice in Chapter 3 to explain the background of the study, and a transnational approach to narratives in the analysis of the novels in Chapters 4–7. Here, I would like to emphasize the advantages of including postcolonial feminist perspectives in these approaches, given that the aim of the study is to investigate how gender and resistance to silences and denials are relevant in narratives of memories of the violent conflicts. These perspectives enable me to specifically address intersectional inequalities in relation to globalization and transnationalism. Postcolonial research often takes its starting point in the lives and experiences of those on the margins of global and local power relations (such as colonized people), rather than those at the centre (such as colonizers). Following Krishna’s thinking on globalization and postcolonialism, we can define globalization as the combined economic and socio-political cultural changes of the contemporary epoch and colonialism as a practice that has involved the domination of certain societies and peoples by others over the past five centuries. Postcolonialism is thus the perspective or worldview of those who believe that it is only possible to understand today’s world by foregrounding the history of colonialism. An important aspect of postcolonialism is its sensitivity to issues of Eurocentrism or cultural domination. Broadly speaking, we can see postcolonialism as a discursive or theoretical standpoint that opposes Eurocentrism in all its forms. This includes when knowledge production and cultural domination is deployed by a geographically demarcated West upon a non-West, but also when dominant narratives that equate modernization with civilization, development and progress become instruments of oppression in the hands of once-colonized elites and nation-states in the Third World. These elites can justify their political rule and claims of cultural superiority over their fellow citizens in the name of their privileged access to the narratives of modernization (Krishna, 2009, and for this last aspect see notably Chapter 6 of this study). One postcolonial research field that is relevant to this study is what I would like to call postcolonial memory politics . This concerns a politics in

32

P. STOLTZ

which actors and societies collectively deal with memories of past injustices related to colonialism and/or related wars and their effects upon notions of equality and justice in the present and the future (see Stoltz, 2016). It relates questions of power and domination to hegemony and resistance; since we can ask: who writes the history of the subjugated people and who listens to the claims for redress after historical injustices? (see Chakrabarty, 2008; Guha, 1998; Krishna, 2009; Spivak, 1988; Stoltz, 2019; Yuval-Davis, 2011). Feminist work addressing gender and memory provides important tools and insights for our understandings of post-conflict transformations (see Edkins, 2003; Kassem, 2011; Moyo & Lahai, 2018; Soh, 2008). This includes addressing silences in memories of genocide (see Horowitz, 1994, 1997; Jacobs, 2010). Studies of genocide often take the Holocaust as a starting point for their thinking (for a postcolonial discussion of this, see Chapter 6). Feminist thinking on the Holocaust has concerned not only a focus on women’s stories from within the Jewish community and within particular national boundaries, but also studies that examine transnational memories and the role of ethnic backgrounds in relation to gendered memories and a focus on marginalized victims such as the Roma, Afro-Germans and lesbians and gay men. This has offered insights into how some memories come to gain authority and power in the public arena, while others do not. These insights have provided a more dynamic understanding of the trajectories of memory across and between gender, class, ethnicity and national identities (Reading, 2014). In the present study, I find it equally fruitful to use dynamic and complex, rather than simplistic, understandings of gender. Feminist researchers have demonstrated that embodiment is political and that the assumption that ‘sexual determínism’ (or the belief that there are two and only two sexes) mandates a particular political order. They have traced the historical emergence of beliefs concerning biological determinism and the political work that has used this determinism. Feminist researchers have also conceptualized racialization and gendering as political processes that create and sustain divisions of labour, social stratifications, modes of subjection and structures of desire (Hawkesworth, 2013). In contrast to research that addresses gender in global politics, but uses it only as a variable or takes an essentialist view of it, I work in this study within a critical tradition of feminist scholarship that moves beyond the status quo and is thus political. Paying attention to gender, and including all women, men and other genders, means paying close attention not only to global

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

33

elites, but also to everyday lives. From this, it follows that gender is not always the primary or only category of analysis, but rather that it is one of a series of markers that shape subjectivities and positionalities. By paying close attention to gender and everyday lives, we can recognize how subject positions in varied matrices of domination are always shaped by intersections of gender, race, class or other categories (see Wibben, 2016, pp. 2–4). In the context of this study, colonial projects have both disrupted gender orders and launched new hegemonic projects. We can trace configurations of gender and, for example, masculinities across the contemporary complex of institutions and cultural patterns and practices that enabled the metropolitan societies to sustain empire. The historical continuity of this complex underlies the coloniality of power and its persistence in today’s world (Connell, 2016). It is therefore important to investigate the nexus between local and global power relations. By focusing on transnational memories, I will develop the point that a gender order emerges in transnational space and that we can define minimal conditions for hegemony within it (see Chapter 5). I will show how counter-hegemonic projects can have limited reach and that it is therefore important in the study of masculinities from a global perspective to understand the concept of hegemony as under construction, rather than as already achieved (Connell, 2016, p. 303; see also Hearn, Blagojevi´c, & Harrison, 2014; Stoltz, 2019). I will use an intersectional approach in my analysis of the novels. This is a widely used approach, which combines gender and postcolonialism and was developed by, amongst others, postcolonial feminists (Yuval-Davis, 2006, 2011). American Black feminist Crenshaw (1989) was the first to use the concept of intersectionality in her discussion of Black women’s employment in the USA, but this was part of a broader analytical and political move by postcolonial, Third World/Southern, Black and other anti-racist feminists, who were eager to deconstruct the categories of ‘women’ and racial categories such as ‘Blacks’. They wanted to critique Eurocentric analytical paradigms (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1983; Anthias, Yuval-Davis, & Cain, 1992; Mohanty, 2002), and argued that social inequalities are historically uncertain and that social experiences vary across time and space (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1983; Hill Collins, 2015). Bringing hegemonic gender frameworks into dialogue with an intersectional analysis can help to explain tensions between individual and collective identities because it enables me to investigate how forms of social

34

P. STOLTZ

inequality other than gender can influence, shape and construct gender. It is thus the dynamics of the power relations that are in focus, rather than the fixation of categories of bodies and power relations. A multilevel approach to intersectionality can help me to take issue with structures at the macro level as well as identities and practices at the micro level (Christensen & Qvotrup Jensen, 2014).

2.4

Resistance and Affective Relations

The background to this study concerns the power of governments and their unwillingness to engage with global trends and norms in how to deal with historical injustices. Power and resistance relate to each other, which brings me here to the notion of resistance. Lilja, Baaz, Schulz, and Vinthagen (2017) discuss the entanglements of power and resistance, and suggest how we can understand the relationship between different forms of resistance. They identify two trajectories in research on resistance. The first relates it to agency and focuses on the relations that subjects have with others. The reason for this is that historical and cultural contexts form subjects and consequently also resistance and agency. Mahmood (2005) is an example of a researcher following this trajectory (Lilja et al., 2017), which is also recognizable in the postcolonial perspective that I use in this study. The second trajectory emphasizes that there are different ways to practise resistance and that these practices exist on a sliding scale: ‘everyday resistance’ such as sarcasm, passivity, laziness, disloyalty or avoidance, which are quiet or seemingly invisible, might be followed by more visible and ‘organized resistance’, such as riots, social movements or the formation of political parties. Alternatively, organized resistance might not follow. The link between everyday resistance and organized resistance remains unclear. Organized resistance under politically constrained conditions might lead individuals to wait until open resistance is less dangerous and an improved position arises. It might follow that these individuals return to everyday resistance rather than consolidating organized resistance. Researchers such as Scott (1985, 1989) and Bayat (1997) use this approach in different ways (Lilja et al., 2017). This last aspect of the link between everyday and organized resistance is relevant to this study in the context of the ways in which Indonesian actors resist denials of their memories of mass violence and genocide during different periods of post-war and post-colonial history. I have already addressed this in the Preface in

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

35

relation to the life of the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. I will notably develop this in Chapter 6 in the analysis of the novel by Mangunwijaya and in Chapter 7 in the analysis of the novel by Chudori. Activism concerning postcolonial memory politics, like any other form of activism, is related to emotions. It becomes relevant to relate activism to emotions about trauma, when it concerns struggles about memories of violent conflicts. Rigney understands trauma as ‘open wounds ’ of the past. They are sites of suffering and violence, which seem difficult to understand, since they are shocking and intolerable. Victims have vivid memories of traumatic events, but these events are still difficult to put into words in the usual modes of public recollection. They mark a rupture in experience and in practices of cultural remembrance. Because they have not been articulated or acknowledged in public (or ‘worked through’), this implies that they continue to affect victims as well as society. In cases where societies fail to fully recognize and understand past injustices, they risk the trauma being perpetuated in a different form (Craps, 2013; Rigney, 2016, p. 72). This is why norms of transitional justice have emerged. Research on trauma took its starting point in studies of individuals in relation to one event: the Holocaust. This limited the field, and made it unable to account for non-Western experiences of trauma. Early trauma researchers did not address other events (such as, in our case, the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during WWII, or the genocide of 1965, or the relations between traumatic events in different parts of the world). An individualistic model concentrates on curing the individual, but because of this focus on the individual, the sociopolitical conditions that led to the trauma (including racism or sexism) could go unaddressed. A postcolonial approach is useful here, because it can help to identify and address these neglected aspects (Craps, 2013). Processes of representation play a key role in making traumatic events collectively meaningful. This includes those who do not experience trauma directly, but who only bear witness to trauma, from a distance. Ahmed has pointed out that the lived experiences of pain by individuals are shaped by contact with others. The pain of others is evoked in the public domain, as something which demands not only an individual, but also a collective response (Ahmed, 2014, p. 20). Hutchison (2016, 2019) argues that representational practices— speech, writing, imaging—are all we have in order to understand emotions in the social realm. We experience emotions, and the bodily

36

P. STOLTZ

feelings and affects that precede them, internally. This means that we can only make the way we feel known, and then only incompletely known, through the instrumental display of emotions. Not only does trauma become political through representation, but there is a gap between experiences of trauma and how it subsequently takes representational shape, so that power relations and inequalities become apparent and our emotions are moulded into shape. In particular circumstances, traumatic events and histories ‘snowball ’ into collective forms of meaning and feeling that distinguish a community as what Hutchinson calls an ‘affective community’. These circumstances include some instances of suffering and some bodies becoming part of a collective memory and consciousness, while others do not. Representations and interpretations shape how different actors see and feel bodies in global politics. This makes representations of trauma a good place to examine the parallel politics of emotions and community (Hutchison, 2016, 2019), including of emotions and resistance. This is important, because the representation of controversial events becomes a resource, which politicians and others can use strategically within different political arenas. Public knowledge of an event can deeply affect how a democracy functions (Rigney, 2018; Tota & Hagen, 2016). Pedwell suggests that we think in terms of ‘affective relations’ when we consider the role of emotions and affect in transnational politics. One of her key arguments is that ‘…theorising transnational links among emotion, power and social transformation requires that we examine affective relations, rather than isolating individual emotions as unified and discrete entities…[this] involves addressing the imbrication of emotion and feeling with structural relations of power in the context of contemporary biopolitics and geo-politics’ (Pedwell, 2014, p. 18). Emotions that have political significance in this study include: empathy, disinterest, outrage, hope and shame.

2.5

Narratives of Memories of Violent Conflicts

The above discussion of representations of trauma challenge us methodologically to think about the links between personal, social and strategic narratives. Let me continue by explaining the narrative approach that I will use. Narratives are a way of making sense of the world around us. They produce meaning, articulate intentions and legitimize actions. The choice of different elements in a particular narrative reveals much about the teller

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

37

of the narrative (Bruner, 2002, pp. 8–9, 15; Wibben, 2011, p. 2). One way of defining narratives, following Labov, is to focus on events and texts as central elements. According to Labov’s understanding, personal narratives are primarily texts which have the function of representing past events in the form of a story (Labov, 1972, p. 359; Patterson in Andrews et al., 2008, p. 23). Let me take the example of the novel ‘Indische duinen’ [My Father’s War] by Adriaan van Dis (1994), which is analysed in Chapter 4. It is told from the perspective of a second-generation postcolonial migrant: a 46-year-old son, called A, who was born in the Netherlands as part of a mixed-race family. The rest of the family shares a past in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, but the son, who was born in the Netherlands in 1946, does not. His father, a veteran of the colonial army, dies when he is eleven. We can understand this narrative about the events of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia and the post-conflict transformations that followed in the Netherlands, following Labov’s approach, as a personal narrative of these events, and we can treat the novel as a text . The function of that text is to represent past events in the form of a story, a story about the memories of the violent conflicts in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia and how these ‘travelled’ to the Netherlands. Here, we can define narratives as representations of events. At the same time, this produces a dilemma, since events relate to experiences. In addition, we have not considered context. This gives rise to a range of theoretical, methodological and interpretational problems (see Patterson in Andrews et al., 2008; Bruner, 2002, Chapter 1). These involve the context of the time during which the conflict took place (the 1940s) and when the book was published (1994). In addition, it involves the locality in which the conflict took place (Indonesia) and the one in which the memories in the novel are received (the Netherlands); whether the experiences of the character A are related to those of his mother and sisters or not, and how the author relates to the characters. Unfortunately, using an experience-centred perspective on narrative is not desirable, because it implies the problematic assumption that narrative involves some reconstruction of stories across times and places. We cannot repeat narratives in an identical manner. Words never ‘mean’ the same thing twice, and stories are performed differently in different social contexts (see Squire in Andrews et al., 2008, p. 44; see also Shenhav, 2015, Chapter 1). This can result in multiple and changeable storylines. It moves us to interpersonal contexts, taking into account broader social

38

P. STOLTZ

and cultural contexts, as we can also see above. In relation to the levels of analysis, interpersonal contexts are situated at the micro level of analysis. Personal narratives in interpersonal contexts lead us to group, collective or social narratives and to the theorizing of political scientist Shenhav on social narratives (2015). He uses a fairly technical, simple and straightforward definition of narrative: it is the narration of a succession of events (Shenhav, 2015, p. 15). This minimalist definitional strategy taps into what narratives are, but not what they do or what we want them to do (Shenhav, 2015, pp. 11–17). Given that I will refer to the narratives of different actors in this study, this is a useful definition for what follows. Shenhav defines social narratives as narratives that are embraced by a group and that tell, in one way or another, something about that group (Shenhav, 2015, pp. 17–18; on the narrative creation of self, see also Bruner, 2002, Chapter 3). The social narratives of Indonesia or the Netherlands tell us something about these societies. The focus on the course of events is important in social narratives, according to Shenhav, since this is the way that we, as human beings, conceive of time. The inclusion of additional elements—such as causality, coherence, meaningfulness, structure or effects—limits the scope of what he considers a narrative. Aspects of narratives can be captured in the so-called ‘narrative triplet’ of story (defined as the chronological sequence of events derived from a narrative, as well as the characters involved in them), text (defined as the mode in which the story is conveyed) and narration (defined as the process of communicating the story). This narrative triplet is a methodological device. It is a means by which to separate and analyse something that, ontologically, is an integrated whole (Shenhav, 2015, Chapter 1). Using the term social narratives—instead of collective or group narratives—has the advantage that it is consistent with the assumption that narratives in the social domain are not only aggregations of stories but rather the product of multiplicity or the process of repetition and variation through which narratives are being reproduced. This can be orally, visually or in writing, and it can involve fiction, imagination, ancient history, shared experience or future prospects. It leaves open the question of whether they are created top-down or bottom-up, or how they change over time. Multiplicity—next to the narrative triplet of text, story and narration—is the fourth key term in the analysis of social narratives (Shenhav, 2015, pp. 17–19). The multiplicity within social narratives is very useful in this study, because I am not only interested in the social narratives of the Netherlands and Indonesia, but particularly in how these open-ended narratives

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

39

can be understood in relation to the transnational memories contained within the personal narratives in the novels. Whereas the personal narratives are found at the micro level of analysis, the novels as such are located at the meso level. These are collective narratives, due to their mass distribution to a national and sometimes international audience. Novels such as those of Alfred Birney (see Chapter 5) and Y. B. Mangunwijaya (see Chapter 6) form counter-narratives to the hegemonic national narratives of the conflicts. Birney’s autobiographical novel ‘De tolk van Java’ [‘The Interpreter from Java’] of 2016 was published in relation to the interpretive and implicatory denial, as well as the inaction, of politicians in Dutch politics and society on the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies and the Indonesian war of independence (see Cohen, 2001; Cohen & Husain, 2008 on denial and inaction). In relation to the translation of norms, the notion of strategic narratives becomes useful, as it has emerged within the study of political communication and international relations. Strategic narratives can be defined, following Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle, as a means for political actors to construct a shared meaning about the past, present and future of international politics in order to shape the behaviour of domestic and international actors (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2013; see also Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2017; Roselle, Miskimmon, & O’Loughlin, 2014). Strategic narratives have a beginning, a middle and an end, as opposed to the open-endedness of social narratives. Their purpose is to persuade and influence other actors. This requires an end, possibly in the form of a decision, a law or a policy, and a focus on victory in the face of opposition; for example, if we understand peace-building narratives as negotiation processes (see De Almagro Iniesta, 2015). An example of strategic narratives is transitional justice documents and institutions, which tell a narrative about how we, as a global society, are concerned with redress for past wrongdoings and human-rights violations. Global norms on transitional justice are codified in legal documents such as the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Geneva Conventions and the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, as well as in institutions such as ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals, the International Criminal Court and truth commissions. Different political actors can use the narratives in these documents and institutions strategically (see the background in Chapter 3).

40

P. STOLTZ

2.6

Narrative Mobility and Tellability

Before I finish, let me briefly reflect upon the question of how we can describe the relationship between the stories in the novels that are analysed in this study and social reality. Nowadays, few, if any, scholars argue that stories—including both fiction and so-called ‘true’ stories—can provide a complete and accurate representation of reality. Rather, the debate concerns the extent to which stories reflect ‘societal realities’. On the one hand, thinkers such as Ricoeur argue that narratives can reflect reality in that stories, like reality, are structured along a chronological axis. Thinkers such as White, on the other hand, argue that humans, to help them cope with a non-narrative reality, produce stories. By imposing narrative structures on reality, people pass moral judgements on events (Ricoeur, 1980, p. 169; 1984, p. 52; Shenhav, 2015, pp. 69–70; White, 1980, p. 18). This also raises the issue of the relation between stories, reality and truth. If we assume that stories are inventions, then we can ask who has the authority to create the ‘real ’ stories in social narratives (Shenhav, 2015, p. 71). We can also wonder: do stories form and change social reality? If we assume that people communicate through stories, then stories and society can either sustain and reinforce each other, or create a dynamic of change. The material nature of texts makes them simultaneously vulnerable to political domination and social control (Shenhav, 2015, pp. 72–74). This returns us to the research questions of this study: What do we know about the past? How do we know what we know about the past? What do we think of past, present and future? In addition, what power relations are at play in the formulation of the narratives of the ‘we’ in these questions? Radstone has argued that we could link the traumatic impact of an event to the puncturing of a fantasy that has previously sustained a sense of individual or national identity. She proposes that nations transform events into meaningful experiences by ‘dominant cultural idioms ’ that are underpinned by fantasy scenarios. The puncturing of fantasies of impregnability and invincibility can emerge in an unpleasantly clear way at times of national crisis (Radstone, 2002). An example of this could be the Indonesian proclamation of independence and thereby the Dutch loss of its colonial powers in Indonesia. As an often-repeated slogan of the late 1940s formulated it: Indië verloren, rampspoed geboren [The Dutch East Indies lost, calamity born].

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

41

Bringing about social change requires access to the social domain. Whereas anyone can be a narrator within this domain, only very few achieve the status of influential narrators. If we want to evaluate the narrative mobility of a given society in the sense of its tolerance towards new narrators and narratives, then a working assumption is that every society or group finds an equilibrium point between accepting and rejecting new social narratives. We can empirically evaluate this equilibrium as well as the possibility of its loss (Shenhav, 2015, pp. 74–77). The chapters in this study open up space for such an evaluation by addressing possible changes in the so-called ‘tellability’ of narratives about memories of the conflicts in different (national, transnational and global) contexts.

2.7

Innovative Approaches and Perspectives

A point that many scholars in the social sciences tend to overlook is the observation that there is a need for creativity and imagination if certain memories are to be shared at all (Rigney, 2016, p. 72). Novels are somewhat uncommon sources for political science scholars such as myself, but I use novels in this analysis because they enable their authors to resist denials of historical injustices under both authoritarian and democratic rule, such as in Indonesia, or, when postcolonial nostalgia or colonial sentiments guide hegemonic narratives of the past, such as in the Netherlands. Novels can also capture transnational and global processes of memory politics and transitional justice as relevant backgrounds for a story. The narrative approach that I use makes an innovative methodological contribution to debates on narratives in political science and international relations. This is an emerging field of research, which has introduced notions of social narratives (Shenhav, 2015) and strategic narratives (Miskimmon et al., 2013; Miskimmon et al., 2017; Roselle et al., 2014). Feminist international relations scholars have also been active in this field and have contributed by introducing new perspectives to the local–global nexus of post-conflict transformations and by suggesting that more attention be paid to everyday forms of resistance (Dauphinee, 2013; Wibben, 2011). The two Indonesian and two Dutch (auto-)biographical novels from different periods of time narrate and comment upon the personal narratives of the transnational memories of first- and second-generation migrants and refugees. They enable me to analyse the links that are (or are not) made between memories of the different conflicts, and relate the

42

P. STOLTZ

resistances in these personal narratives—which move across time, place and space—to different strategic and social narratives. The contribution made by my approach also concerns the discussion of the links between personal, strategic and social narratives. Notably, how social and strategic narratives relate to different types of denial of memories of historical injustices. The central focus of this study is the thick narrative analysis of personal narratives in the two Dutch and two Indonesian novels (Chapters 4–7). I combine this with a thin narrative analysis of social and strategic narratives in Chapter 3, which provides a background to the relevance of transitional justice in the different states. I address the links between personal, strategic and social narratives throughout the study. By focusing on gender and resistance from both Indonesian and Dutch perspectives (which is surprisingly rare in research on these conflicts), as well as from transnational and global perspectives (which are also forgotten surprisingly often in research), I provide innovative perspectives upon the memories of the three conflicts. My research strategy challenges assumptions made in research on memory politics by opening up space for a broader discussion of the ways in which transnational memories can influence projects of redress, recognition and new cycles of denial. Subsequently, the strategy challenges assumptions in both memory politics and transitional justice by enabling a more nuanced understanding of the role of gender in relation to memories of violent conflicts. I do this by engaging with notions of masculinities, intersectionality and queer or fluid understandings of gender. This strategy also brings postcolonial and transnational approaches into focus. Finally, my research strategy enables a broader discussion of the ways in which emotional understandings of these violent conflicts are not shared in the narrative struggles surrounding these events and the consequences of this for the political roles played by emotions and affect in projects of redress, recognition and cycles of denial. This includes the strategy opening up space for a broader discussion of the ways in which feelings, emotions, affect and resistance relate to each other. Feminist and postcolonial approaches are important in the analysis of resistance. Better knowledge about gender, intersectional power relations and social inequalities can enhance our understanding of the political strategies developed by individuals and groups to resist silence and address denials of responsibility by governments and other political actors.

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

43

Both feminist and postcolonial approaches emphasize the importance of intersectional inequalities and of avoiding methodological nationalism by focusing on transnational processes (Mohanty, 2002; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). The travelling of memories, or so-called ‘transnational memories’, is such a transnational process (Assmann, 2014; Assmann & Conrad, 2010; Erll, 2011). Consequently, the aim of the study requires an analysis of how strategies of resistance relate to the past and present in different parts of the world in order to obtain justice and equality in the future.

References Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Andrews, M., Squire, C., & Tamboukou, M. (Eds.). (2008). Doing narrative research. London: Sage. Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (1983). Contextualizing feminism: Gender, ethnic and class divisions. Feminist Review, 15(Winter), 62–75. Anthias, F., Yuval-Davis, N., & Cain, H. (1992). Racialized boundaries: Race, nation, gender, colour and class and the anti-racist struggle. London: Routledge. Assmann, A. (2014). Transnational memories. European Review, 22(4), 546–556. Assmann, A., & Conrad, S. (Eds.). (2010). Memory in a global Age: Discourses, practices and trajectories. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Bayat, A. (1997). Un-civil society: The politics of the ‘informal people’. Third World Quarterly, 18, 53–72. Bell, C., & O’Rourke, C. (2007). Does feminism need a theory of transitional justice? An introductory essay. The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 1(1), 23–44. Brown, K., & Ní Aoláin, F. (2015). Through the looking glass: Transitional justice futures through the lens of nationalism, feminism and transformative change. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(1), 127–149. Bruner, J. (2002). Making stories: Law, literature, life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buckley-Zistel, S., Koloma Beck, T., Braun, C., & Mieth, F. (Eds.). (2014). Transitional justice theories. New York, NY: Routledge. Chakrabarty, D. (2008). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Christensen, A.-D., & Qvotrup Jensen, S. (2014). Combining hegemonic masculinity and intersectionality. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(1), 60–75.

44

P. STOLTZ

Cohen, S. (2001). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cohen, S., & Husain, E. (2008). States of denial and the secular state. RSA Journal, 154(5534), 48–49. Connell, R. (2016). Masculinities in global perspectives. Theory and Society, 45(4), 303–318. Coser, L. A. (1992). Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs 1877–1945. In M. Halbwachs (Ed.), On collective memory: Edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (pp. 1–34). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Craps, S. (2013). Postcolonial witnessing: Trauma out of bounds. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(article 8), 139–167. Dauphinee, E. (2013). The politics of exile. London: Routledge. De Almagro Iniesta, M. M. (2015). Negotiated contestation in peacebuilding: Maintaining or transforming systemic narratives? Critical Studies on Security, 3(3), 326–327. De Cesari, C. & Rigney, A. (Eds.). (2014). Transnational memory: Circulation, articulation, scales. Media and Cultural Memory Series. Berlin: De Gruyter. De Greiff, P. (2012). Theorizing transitional justice. In M. S. Williams, R. Nagy, & J. Elster (Eds.), Transitional justice: Nomos Li (pp. 31–77). New York, NY: New York University Press. Dube, S. I. (2011). Transitional justice beyond the normative: Towards a literary theory of political transitions. The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 5(2), 177–197. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Erll, A. (2011). Travelling memory. Parallax, 17 (4), 4–18. Eyerman, R. (2016). Social movements and memory. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 79–83). London: Routledge. Finnemore, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). International norm dynamics and political change. International Organization, 52(4), 887–917. Guha, R. (1998). Dominance without hegemony: History and power in colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutman, Y., Brown, A., & Sodaro, A. (Eds.). (2010). Memory and the future: Transnational politics, ethics, and society. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory: Edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hancock, A.-M. (2016). ‘We are named by others and we are named by ourselves’: Social constructivism and intersectionality-like thinking. In A.-M.

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

45

Hancock (Ed.), Intersectionality: An intellectual history (pp. 1–33). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Oxford Scholarship Online. Hawkesworth, M. (2013). Sex, gender and sexuality. In G. Waylen, K. Celis, J. Kantola, & S. L. Weldon (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender and politics (pp. 31–56). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hearn, J., Blagojevi´c, M., & Harrison, K. (Eds.). (2014). Rethinking transnational men: Beyond, between and within nations. New York, NY: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20. Hinton, A. (Ed.). (2010). Transitional justice: Global mechanisms and local realities after genocide and mass violence. New York, NY: Rutgers University Press. Horowitz, S. (1994). Memory and testimony in women survivors of Nazi genocide. In J. Baskin (Ed.), Women of the word: Jewish women and jewish writing (pp. 258–282). Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Horowitz, S. (1997). Voicing the void: Muteness and memory in Holocaust fiction. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hutchison, E. (2016). Affective communities in world politics: Collective emotions after trauma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hutchison, E. (2019). Emotions, bodies, and the un/making of international relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47 (2), 284–298. Inglis, D. (2016). Globalization and/of memory: On the complexification and contestation of memory cultures and practices. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 143–157). London: Routledge. Jacobs, J. (2010). Memorializing the Holocaust: Gender, genocide and collective memory. London: I.B. Tauris. Kassem, F. (2011). Palestinian women: Narrative histories and gendered memories. London: Zed Books. Katzenstein, P. J. (1996). Introduction: Alternative perspectives on national security. In P. J. Katzenstein (Ed.), The culture of national security: Norms and identity in world politics (pp. 1–32). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kent, L. (2012). The dynamics of transitional justice. London: Routledge. Krishna, S. (2009). Globalization and postcolonialism: Hegemony and resistance in the twenty-first century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city: Studies in the Black English vernacular. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Levy, D., & Sznaider, N. (2002). Memory unbound: The Holocaust and the formation of cosmopolitan memory. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(1), 87–106. Lilja, M., Baaz, M., Schulz, M., & Vinthagen, S. (2017). How resistance encourages resistance: Theorizing the nexus between power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’. Journal of Political Power, 10(1), 40–54.

46

P. STOLTZ

Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McEvoy, K., & McGregor, L. (Eds.). (2008). Transitional justice from below: Grassroots activism and the struggle for change. Oxford, UK and Portland, OR: Hart. Mihr, A. (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 1–28). London: Routledge. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2013). Strategic narratives: Communication power and the new world order. London: Routledge. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (Eds.). (2017). Forging the world: Strategic narratives and international relations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2002). ‘Under Western eyes’ revisited. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(2), 499–535. Moyo, K., & Lahai, J. I. (2018). Gender in human rights and transitional justice. In J. I. Lahai & K. Moyo (Eds.), Gender in human rights and transitional justice: Crossing boundaries of gender and politics in the global South (pp. 1–15). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Nagy, R. (2008). Transitional justice as global project: Critical reflections. Third World Quarterly, 29(2), 275–289. Ní Aoláin, F. (2012). Advancing feminist positioning in the field of transitional justice. The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 6(2), 205–228. Olick, J. K. (2016). Sites of memory studies [Lieux des études des mémoire]. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 41–52). London: Routledge. Patterson, W. (2008). Narratives of events: Labovian narrative analysis and its limitations. In M. Andrews, C. Squire, & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research (pp. 22–40). London: Sage. Pedwell, C. (2014). Affective relations: The transnational politics of empathy. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Radstone, S. (2002). The war of the fathers: Trauma, fantasy, and September 11. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(1), 457–459. Radstone, S. (2011). What place is this? Transcultural memory and the locations of memory studies. Parallax, 17 (4), 109–123. Reading, A. (2014). Making memory work for feminist theory. In M. Evans, C. Hemmings, M. Henry, H. Johnstone, S. Madhok, A. Plomien, & S. Wearing (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of feminist theory (pp. 196–214). London: Sage. Reiter, A. G. (2017). Measuring the success (or failure) of transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 269–288). London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1980). Narrative time. Critical Inquiry, 7 (1), 169–190.

2

GLOBALIZATION, INTERSECTIONAL INEQUALITIES …

47

Ricoeur, P. (1984). Time and Narrative [Temps et Recít] (Vol. 1, K. McLaughlin & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rigney, A. (2016). Cultural memory studies: Mediation, narrative and the aesthetic. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 65–76). London: Routledge. Rigney, A. (2018). Remembering hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. Roselle, L., Miskimmon, A., & O’Loughlin, B. (2014). Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power. Media, War & Conflict, 7 (1), 70–84. Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, M. (2014). Afterword: Locating transnational memory. European Review, 22(4), 652–656. Schwartz, B. (2016). Rethinking the concept of collective memory. In A. L. Tota & T. Haven (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 9–21). London: Routledge. Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Scott, J. C. (1989). Everyday forms of resistance. Copenhagen Papers, 4, 33–62. Shaw, R., & Waldorf, L., with Hazan, P. (Eds.). (2010). Localizing transitional justice: Interventions and priorities after mass violence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shenhav, S. R. (2015). Analyzing social narratives. London: Routledge. Shepherd, L. J. (2011). Sex, security and superhero(in)es: From 1325 to 1820 and beyond. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13(4), 504–521. Sierp, A., & Wüstenberg, J. (2015). Linking the local and the transnational: Rethinking memory politics in Europe. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 23(3), 321–329. Simic, O. (Ed.). (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. London: Routledge. Soh, C. S. (2008). The comfort women: Sexual violence and post-colonial memory in Korea and Japan. Chicago, IL and London, UK: University of Chicago Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Squire, C. (2008). Experience-centred and culturally-oriented approaches to narrative. In M. Andrews, C. Squire, & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing narrative research (pp. 41–63). London: Sage. Stoltz, P. (2016). Postkoloniale narrativer [Postcolonial narratives]. In I. Glavind Bo, A.-D. Christensen, & T. Lund Thomsen (Eds.), Narrativ forskning – tilgange og metoder [Narrative research—Approaches and methods] (pp. 293–312]. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

48

P. STOLTZ

Stoltz, P. (2019). Masculinities, postcolonialism and transnational memories of violent conflicts. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 14(3), 152–167. Teitel, R. G. (2003). Transitional justice genealogy. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 16, 69–94. Teitel, R. G. (2014). Globalizing transitional justice: Contemporary essays. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Tota, A. L., & Hagen, T. (2016). Introduction. Memory work: Naming pasts, transforming futures. In A. L. Tota & T. Hagen (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of memory studies (pp. 1–6). London: Routledge. White, H. (1980). The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry, 7 (1), 5–27. Wibben, A. T. R. (2011). Feminist security studies: A narrative approach. New York, NY: Routledge. Wibben, A. T. R. (2016). Introduction: Feminists study war. In A. T. R. Wibben (Ed.), Researching war: Feminist methods, ethics & politics (pp. 1–9). New York: Routledge. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Networks, 2(4), 301–334. Yuval-Davis, N. (2006). Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 13(3), 193–209. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage. Zwingel, S. (2016). Translating international women’s rights: The CEDAW convention in context. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zwingel, S. (2017). Women’s rights norms as content-in-motion and incomplete practice. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2(5), 675–690.

Novels Birney, A. (2016). De tolk van Java [The interpreter from Java]. Amsterdam: De Geus. Chudori, L. (2012). Pulang. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia. Chudori, L. (2015). Home (Indonesian original, Pulang, 2012). Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum Publishing. Mangunwijaya, Y. B. (1991). Durga/Umayi. Jakarta: Grafiti. Mangunwijaya, Y. B. (2004). Durga/Umayi (Indonesian original, Durga/Umayi, 1991). Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Singapore University Press. van Dis, A. (1994). Indische duinen [Indisch dunes]. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

CHAPTER 3

Transitional Justice Norms: the UN, Indonesia and the Netherlands

This study is concerned with the political puzzle of why the silences and denials that relate to memories of the violent conflicts that took place in Indonesia continue, despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice. In this chapter, I start by introducing theories of norm translation, which enable us to consider the possibility that norms are not always or everywhere implemented in the way that one might expect when hearing the words ‘global’ and ‘norm’ (see Zwingel, 2016, 2017). Related to this, I address some of the global norms on transitional justice that are relevant to the memory struggles relating to the three conflicts. This includes the role of the UN during the period following WWII, in questions over how to address historical injustices related to genocide, decolonization and gender. I continue by describing contestations of these global norms on transitional justice—or denials of responsibility and inaction (Cohen, 2001; Cohen & Husain, 2008)—by subsequent Dutch and Indonesian governments during the period under study (1942–2015). The contesting of global transitional justice measures does not necessarily mean that these governments have not addressed issues such as the needs of war victims. Neither does it mean that other actors did not (re)act. I end by describing how organized resistance by human rights NGOs, victims’ organizations and other memory actors attempt to translate or appropriate global transitional justice norms.

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_3

49

50

P. STOLTZ

Methodologically, I will conduct a thin narrative analysis of the strategic narratives of governments and other memory actors, as well as a thin norm translation analysis. It is thin because both serve as a background to the following analysis of the novels, where resistance against silence and denials is the focus. I will further develop relevant parts of this background in the following chapters.

3.1

Norm Translation as International and Transnational Relations

In the previous chapter, I defined transitional justice in a holistic manner and emphasized that it concerns both a concept and a process that encompass a number of different legal, political and cultural instruments and mechanisms. In addition, I defined a norm as a standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity (Katzenstein, 1996, p. 5). Researchers of norms often start with international relations and politics, which involve the United Nations. The United Nations has codified norms about transitional justice in different official and quasi-official international documents. The binding character of these can vary tremendously from case to case. How transitional justice norms have emerged and what their effects have been in the Netherlands and Indonesia during different periods of time constitutes a complex narrative. One of the assumptions (with all its limitations) that provide the basis for discourses and practices of transitional justice is that the phenomenon has become an emerging global norm. This is a global-centrist perspective, which we can trace to early research on norms in the study of international relations as this emerged during the 1980s and 1990s. This research addressed the rise of norms as part of regimes in intergovernmental settings. Regimes were concrete mechanisms of international cooperation with the goal of defining and promoting permissible behaviour, or, as Levy, Young, and Zürn defined it: ‘social institutions consisting of agreed upon principles, norms, rules, procedures and programs that govern the interactions of actors in specific issue areas’ (Levy, Young, & Zürn, 1995, p. 274). Interestingly, this research was a reaction to the assumption in international relations research that international cooperation is secondary to state interests and global power constellations (Krasner, 1983). It thus provided a new understanding of transnational relations and actor constellations that in different ways build connections between international and

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

51

domestic contexts, by studying mechanisms of norm creation and diffusion and investigating the consistency and reach of internationally agreedupon norms. The question was: how likely was it that norms would diffuse and ‘trickle down’? One example of research that attempts to capture this diffusion is the work of Finnemore and Sikkink (1998) on ‘transnational advocacy networks’ (TANs). These networks engage in transnational non-governmental activism in strategic cooperation with governments. Finnemore and Sikkink claimed that it is most likely that TANs emerge when a state blocks civil society claims and transnational cooperation seems likely to strengthen these claims. They identified an ideal type of process of norm diffusion that follows three stages. First, norm emergence concerns the stage when norm entrepreneurs are framing the norm and working to gain support among powerful actors. Second, norm cascading concerns the stage when a critical mass of states embraces these norms and internationally institutionalizes them. Relatedly, ‘norm followers’ emerge, who are convinced by the general approval of the norm rather than by its content. That is, there is not necessarily any conceptual or political bite at this stage. Rather, we can recognize this ‘bite’ at stage three, norm internalization, during which, for example, state bureaucracies implement the norm in domestic settings. If this internalization is far-reaching, then it might be that nobody will contest the norm any longer. There is a problem with this assumption that norms will ‘trickle down’, as though there is a linear—perhaps complex, but still linear—process of regime formation, and either limited or far-reaching regime effects (Kratochwil & Ruggie, 1986; Levy et al., 1995). Zwingel points out that, in this first wave of norm diffusion research, an assumption of the international core sending norms towards domestic receiving ends blocks out the multi-directional spread of norms (bottom–up, top–down, North– South, South–North, South–South) (Zwingel, 2017). In addition, not only international, but also transnational relations, involving more actors than just states and international organizations, matter in norm translations. Sociologists and geographers have investigated the interrelatedness between global, national and local spheres and have pointed out that concreteness and interrelatedness are intrinsic to all local, national and global processes (Massey, 1994; Zwingel, 2016). That is, early norm diffusion literature underestimates the domestic dynamics of norm creation, appropriation and contestation in very different contexts of time and place around the world. A second wave of

52

P. STOLTZ

norm research therefore uses more multidirectional and non-linear perspectives and involves differently contextualized actors. The assumption here is not one of the cause and effect of global norms, but rather that the creation, appropriation and contestation of norms are non-linear processes of negotiation involving differently contextualized actors (Zwingel, 2016, 2017).

3.2 The UN, Genocide, Decolonization and Gender An approach to the study of norms as translation, following Zwingel, is relevant to my understanding of norms in this study. Let me illustrate the usefulness of the approach by describing the emergence of transitional justice norms and the involvement of the UN, including relevant UN documents, and by briefly indicating how these engaged the governments of Indonesia and the Netherlands. We can identify the claim that, since the 1940s, transitional justice has moved from being the exception to the norm, and the expansion of transitional justice from political and legal processes to also include nonjudicial mechanisms in documents from the UN (Teitel, 2003, pp. 71–72 and 89). Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan embraced a holistic approach to transitional justice in 2004 in a report on The Rule of Law on Transitional Justice in Conflict and Post-conflict Societies: The notion of transitional justice … comprises the full range of processes and mechanisms associated with a society’s attempts to come to terms with a legacy of large-scale past abuses, in order to ensure accountability, serve justice and achieve reconciliation. These may include both judicial and nonjudicial mechanisms, with differing levels of international involvement (or none at all) and individual prosecutions, reparations, truth-seeking, institutional reform, vetting and dismissals, or a combination thereof. (UN Security Council, 2004, p. 4)

‘Non-judicial mechanisms ’ can include the arts by means of novels, such as in this study, photo exhibitions or films, the use of memorials and the use of ‘indigenous ’ norms, ‘traditional ’ mechanisms and healing rituals (see Simic, 2017). Annan’s definition represents a broader understanding of transitional justice than the one that emerged in the wake of experiences with WWII. These earlier norms can be related to the political

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

53

and legal processes around the Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946) and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), also known as the Tokyo Trial or the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946–1948). Both tribunals concerned issues that involved events in the Netherlands and Indonesia, which I will address in this study. Most of all, they concerned genocide. One document that exemplifies an appropriate reaction to genocide is ‘The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ of 1948 (UN General Assembly Resolution 260). This begins by stating that: genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world. Recognizing that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity, and Being convinced that, in order to liberate mankind from such an odious scourge, international co-operation is required.

It continues by advising states to prevent or punish actions of genocide, regardless of whether these have been committed during times of peace or war. Two observations are pertinent to this. First, we can recognize strategic narratives involving the United Nations (established in 1945) in both the quotation from Kofi Annan and the Genocide Convention. In the latter, the General Assembly attempts to persuade and influence its member states to construct a shared meaning about the past, present and future of thinking about genocide, and to shape the behaviour of domestic and international actors (see Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2013). We can make a related and similar observation about the statement by Kofi Annan about transitional justice. That is, those who produce strategic narratives—regardless of this is Kofi Annan or Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the word genocide and initiated the Genocide Convention— must negotiate with others in order to produce and codify norms about transitional justice (see Lemkin, 1944). Second, the Genocide Convention was strongly influenced by the experiences of the Holocaust, which took place partly in the Netherlands. Over the decades, a number of assumptions have dominated debates about genocide, including what counts as genocide and what does not, both within and outside of academia. Lawyers and academics have often based these assumptions on Holocaust-centric models of the genocidal

54

P. STOLTZ

process, and on a canon of cases. However, the case of the genocide of 1965 in Indonesia is peripheral to this canon (Hinton, 2012; Melvin & Pohlman, 2018; see Chapter 6 of this study). In addition, issues of mass violence and war crimes committed by the Dutch armed forces during the war of independence in Indonesia, which we could perhaps define as genocide, have also fallen outside of this canon. The violence perpetrated during the long history of colonial Indonesia might also make us wonder how historical cases of genocide relate to this canon today. In the Netherlands, the terms that came into vogue internationally, under the influence of the two tribunals and the Genocide Convention (‘war crimes ’, ‘crimes against humanity’, ‘genocide’) were never used in official documents and do not seem to have influenced the public debate. Long-existing tolerance of colonial deviations from the metropolitan norms about the avoidance of unnecessary violence were maintained, due to deficient colonial control mechanisms, as well as metropolitan and international ones (Raben, 2012; see Chapter 5 of this study). Peacekeeping, decolonization and issues related to gender, peace and security have engaged the United Nations in different ways during the period that I cover in this study (1942–2015). Indonesia proclaimed independence from the colonial power of the Netherlands in 1945. The United Nations Security Council was actively involved in the war for independence, following this proclamation and Dutch attempts to reestablish control over what they considered to be domestic order. One of the earliest peacekeeping missions of the UN concerned The United Nations Good Offices Committee Indonesia (UNGOC), which worked between 1947 and 1951. The UN Commission for Indonesia (1949) later followed this engagement, due to UN Security Council Resolution 67 (1949) on the Indonesian Question, and monitored the transferral of sovereignty from the Netherlands to the United States of Indonesia. Legal, political and military aspects of the negotiations between the UN, the Netherlands and Indonesia were complex, due, amongst other reasons, to the involvement of the USA on the part of the UN. The USA was simultaneously engaged in the Marshall Plan, which financially aided the Netherlands after WWII. At the end of the 1940s, the USA threatened to suspend this aid if the Dutch government continued to oppose Indonesian independence. Global norms for decolonization have slowly emerged over the years. Self-determination of all people was already in 1945 inscribed in the Charter of the United Nations, in Chapter XI (Articles 73 and 74). However,

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

55

it was not until 1960 that the General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (GA Resolution 1514 [XV] of 14 December 1960), in the hope of speeding up the process of decolonization. A Special Committee on Decolonization has monitored the implementation of the Declaration since 1962 and it continues to work with these issues. Although peacekeeping in Indonesia during its war for independence was an early example of transitional justice measures by the United Nations, and global decolonization norms increased in popularity during the late 1950s, addressing gender, peace and security did not become a norm or a standard of appropriate behaviour for states until quite recently. After WWII, the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals failed to adequately address sexual violence, despite extensive knowledge and documentation of systematic sexual enslavement. In the case of Japan, this concerned the enslavement of so-called ‘comfort women’. This is a euphemism used to describe women who were kidnapped, coerced and sold into prostitution for the Japanese military. It concerned women in Japanese-occupied territories, including Indonesia. The Tokyo tribunal did not take the issue of rape into account as a war crime or as a crime against humanity, and it did not call rape victims to testify. This failure has become part of the Trial’s complex legacy. We can recognize the ramifications of the legal silence in memory struggles in which even today revisionists deny and challenge the authenticity of survivor testimonies. As such, the Trial continues to have a powerful impact on the collective memory of WWII in the present day (Henry, 2013), including in relation to demands for recognition and compensation in the Netherlands and Indonesia (see below). Emerging international norms around women’s human rights have played a crucial role in perceiving the issue of sexual violence as a matter of justice. A central document in relation to these norms is the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, which, since its introduction in 2000, has been a recognition of the importance of gender (often understood as women and girls) in violent conflicts. This late recognition of gender in transitional justice norms has become an organizing framework for the Women, Peace and Security agenda, which focuses on advancing the different components of the Resolution. It has resulted in many subsequent resolutions (e.g. 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960,

56

P. STOLTZ

2106, 2122 and 2242) and the agenda has established a strong normative and operational framework, with an increasing number of National Action Plans (NAP) (see George & Shepherd, 2016; Motoyama, 2018; Pratt & Richter-Devroe, 2011; Willett, 2010).

3.3

Dutch Denials

Over the decades, successive Dutch and Indonesian governments have had complex relationships with the United Nations. Both states have also been interested in developing national norms of transitional justice, thereby sidestepping or contesting (emerging) global norms. In the following, I will describe the details of relevant elements of policy processes. Let me here provide examples of some of the strategic narratives of both Dutch and Indonesian governments in the contexts of translating, contesting or ignoring (emerging) global norms of transitional justice and genocide, decolonization and gender. On 17 August 1945, Indonesian nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta declared the country independent from the Netherlands by means of the Proklamasi, the Indonesian Declaration of Independence. This was two days after the surrender of the Japanese at the end of WWII. By May 1945, the Germans had already lost the war. For the Dutch, this meant that post-conflict transformations involved processes that related to conflicts on both sides of the world. In addition, these transformations involved memories of war as well as of colonialism. In this situation, the successive Dutch governments that emerged during the late 1940s and early 1950s prioritized focusing any type of post-conflict policies on the consequences of the German occupation, thereby ignoring the Japanese occupation. In addition, these governments did not initially approve of the new Indonesian republic and attempted to re-establish control over what they considered to be domestic order (Limpach, 2016; Meijer, 2005; Oostindie, 2015; Piersma, 2010; Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010; Willems, 2001). As mentioned above, emerging transitional justice terms, such as ‘genocide’, ‘war crimes ’ or ‘crimes against humanity’, were not part of the strategic narratives of the subsequent Dutch governments during the late 1940s and 1950s, nor were these terms present in the public debate (Raben, 2012). It was not until 20 June 1966 that the Netherlands became an accessory to the 1948 Genocide Convention. In addition, it was not until 1969, when veteran Joop Hueting revealed in an interview

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

57

on Dutch national television the occurrence of mass violence during the Indonesian war for independence, that the Dutch government instigated an investigation, the so-called Memorandum of Excesses [Excessennota]. The political conclusion of this memorandum was that the armed forces had in general acted correctly. Over the following decades, journalists, politicians and researchers occasionally criticized this conclusion but it did not lead to legal repercussions or major historical inquiries (Limpach, 2016, pp. 27–32; Oostindie, 2015; Scagliola, 2012). During the 2010s, a series of civil court cases (see below) and historical studies about the use of mass violence by the Dutch military (see Chapter 1 and below) gained media attention. This, finally, had the effect that the government granted funding for a broad inquiry into the events of the period of decolonization, violence and war in Indonesia (1945–1950). These examples indicate that, in general, the strategic narratives of Dutch governments in their post-conflict policies of the 1940s and 1950s did not tell stories about genocide in the Netherlands or in Indonesia. Governments supported emerging global norms on transitional justice, but they did not appropriate them at home, and the hegemonic narrative about decolonization was that this was a calamity which the Dutch state should avoid (see above, and Chapter 2). Norms on gender, regardless of whether we can understand them in relation to peace and security or not, emerged at an unequal pace at national and international levels. A second wave of feminism emerged during the 1960s and 1970s and international norms on gender, peace and security appeared even later. That is, at both levels, these emerged long after the conflicts. These norms were not considered to be of concern in public policies for war victims and/or perpetrators immediately after the conflicts and they remain in the background of the memory struggles over them. The Netherlands did not ratify CEDAW (1980) until 1991 and has only had NAPs for UNSCR 1325 (2000) since 2007. In contrast, sociological and historical researchers have made another observation. The wars of the 1940s interrupted welfare formation in the Netherlands. Researchers such as De Swaan (2004), Touwen-Bouwsma (2010), and Piersma (2010) point out that emerging European and Dutch norms, ideas and institutions concerned with social security and the welfare state were important for the ways in which, immediately after WWII, Dutch politicians wished to frame financial support for vulnerable groups. This included the fact that Dutch authorities, during and in the decades immediately following WWII, did not distinguish between

58

P. STOLTZ

different groups of war victims, with the exception of members of the resistance. After 1947, resistance fighters or their descendants could, following the logic of a ‘debt of honour’, receive a pension according to the Extraordinary Pension Act [Wet Buitengewoon Pensioen]. The authorities presented this law as a tribute from the Dutch nation to those who had risked their lives or sacrificed themselves for the national cause. This was considered a moral duty of solidarity (Meijer, 2005; Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010, pp. 8–10). However, discontent grew over the decades with the way in which this version of solidarity in the welfare state did not sufficiently cover war victims. In 1970, the notion of ‘special solidarity’ was introduced in a political debate in the Second Chamber of the Dutch Parliament, as part of an argument about the pensions of those who had been persecuted due to their race, religion or worldview. According to this line of argument, the victims of WWII, notably the Jewish community, were in need of ‘special solidarity’. Over the years, politicians increasingly used these notions interchangeably, and legislation geared towards war victims finally emerged (Meijer, 2005; Piersma, 2010; Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010, pp. 8–10). The implementation of ‘debts of honour’ and ‘special solidarity’ was nevertheless fraught with disagreements over who was and was not eligible. This included a Eurocentric interpretation of the law and, controversially, that postcolonial migrants from the Dutch Indies/Indonesia were not considered to be members of the ‘national community’ ‘[volksgemeenschap]’ of the Netherlands (Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010, p. 320). Issues such as lack of attention to internment in Japanese camps, resistance against Japanese occupants and persecution in Indonesia due to race, religion or worldview became increasingly controversial (Piersma, 2010; Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010, pp. 8–10 and 319–331). Over the years, non-governmental diasporic organizations such as Pelita, de Stichting Nederlandse Ereschulden, de Stichting Rechtsherstel KNIL and the umbrella organization Indisch Platform organized petitions, demonstrations and lawsuits against the Dutch state. This concerned redress for the legacies of human rights abuses in these related issues, as well as concerns over so-called backpay (Meijer, 2005, pp. 12–13; 2007; Oostindie, 2011; Piersma, 2010; Steijlen, 2009; Touwen-Bouwsma 2010). Activists use the term backpay to describe the long-term refusal of the authorities in both the Dutch Indies and the Netherlands to pay the salaries of former civil servants and military personnel belonging to the KNIL (the

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

59

Royal Dutch Indies Army) and the Indies Naval Force relating to the period of the Japanese occupation. Initially, the issue of backpay primarily involved financial-legal aspects, but eventually it became loaded with a strong moral dimension and many emotions (Meijer, 2005, pp. 12–13; 2007). Concerns about backpay started to appear in the late 1940s, but still continued after 2015, when the umbrella organization Indisch Platform and the government reached an agreement on financial regulation. Dissatisfaction about this agreement continued due to its late appearance (after 70 years) and the consequent lack of ability to reach those it concerned (many of whom were deceased), their widows or other relatives (Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport (2018a, 2018b, and 2018c). Disagreements amongst activists and organizations about this (and other issues) led in the late 2010s to the creation of Indisch Platform 2.0, working in parallel with Indisch Platform.

3.4

Indonesian Denials

One way of understanding Indonesian contestations of the global norms on transitional justice is by identifying the narratives of subsequent governments in the context of nation building after independence. Global power relations and inequalities, as well as regional dynamics, are of key concern for the positioning of the representatives of this new state over the years. In 1944, as the Japanese forces retreated, Indonesian nationalists responded positively to the requests for political support from the occupation authorities of the Dutch East Indies. On 7 September 1944, the Japanese Prime Minister, Kunaichi Koiso, declared that Japan would grant the state independence and investigatory committees of nationalists were created. By the beginning of August 1945, the Japanese had set a date in September for the creation of the new Indonesian state, and Indonesian nationalist leaders Sukarno and Hatta flew to the Japanese regional headquarters in Vietnam to receive formal authorization for the declaration of independence. Upon their return, they heard the news of the Japanese surrender. This led to turmoil in nationalist circles. Sukarno and Hatta feared that proceeding with the declaration might compromise them with both the Allies and the Japanese, whereas younger nationalists urged an immediate declaration of independence. This would mark the Indonesian people’s seizure of their own future and ensure that independence was not a gift from the Japanese. The young nationalists convinced Sukarno

60

P. STOLTZ

and Hatta, which resulted in the proclamation on 17 August 1945 in the garden of Sukarno’s house at Pegangsaan Timur 56 in Jakarta (Cribb, 2010, Chapter 5; see also Chapter 6 of this study). The new state of Indonesia quickly gained support from many Indonesians and began to take over government offices and other public buildings. The new government hoped that the Atlantic Charter’s assertion of the right of all peoples to self-determination would be extended to Indonesia, if the Dutch did not recognize the declaration. Unfortunately, neither the Dutch nor the other Allies recognized it. This changed, however, and both the British and the UN (see above) eventually tried to negotiate in the violent conflict between the Dutch and the Indonesians. The results of these efforts were the Linggajati Agreement (1946) and the Renville Agreement (1948). Both agreements were very unpopular in the Republic, since they ratified the Dutch conquests. Even moderate Indonesian negotiators eventually refused to cooperate with the Dutch, and combined with violent Indonesian resistance and international condemnation of Dutch strategies. Thus, on 27 December 1949, the Dutch state was forced to transfer sovereignty to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia (Cribb, 2010; Chapter 5 on occupation and revolution). After 1949, Indonesian governments adopted a foreign policy that was ‘active and non-aligned’. Here, the strategy was notably to refuse to align with either side in the Cold War. The outbreak of nationalist and communist revolutions in Burma, Malaya, Vietnam and the Philippines led to suggestions for regional co-operation. This was despite the observation that most national leaders preferred to tailor their strategies to their own specific circumstances. In this context, Indonesia and others wanted to develop a third force of Asian and African countries, which would both moderate the great power conflict and focus attention on problems of global inequity. These efforts resulted in 1955 in the Asia– Africa Conference in Bandung, or the first meeting of ‘the Non-Aligned Movement ’. During the early 1960s, President Sukarno increasingly presented himself as a global leader of the ‘New Emerging Forces ’ against the ‘Old Established Forces ’, which included both the West and the Soviet Union. He also encouraged an Indonesian–Chinese axis (Cribb, 2010, Chapter 5). After the overthrow of President Sukarno and his left-leaning politics of Guided Democracy, an authoritarian and pro-Western military regime under the leadership of President Suharto and his New Order state (1967–1998) took over. The new president was anxious to create

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

61

stable relations with his immediate Southeast Asian neighbours, and this resulted in 1967 in the foundation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It is noteworthy here that Suharto’s rule began around the period of the mass killings of real and alleged Communists in 1965 and 1966 and in the wake of a failed coup (see Chapter 1 of this study). These killings are the clearest case of genocide against a socio-political group in the twentieth century (IPT 1965 Foundation, 2017, pp. 117–121; Melvin & Pohlman, 2018; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). Although Indonesia became a member of the United Nations in 1950, and was, for example, elected in 2018 as a non-permanent member of the Security Council for the fourth time, it has at the time of writing neither signed nor ratified the 1948 Genocide convention. However, the state is bound to the Convention under international customary law. There are other relevant international instruments to which Indonesia actually is a state party, including The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT; ratified by Indonesia in 1998) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR; adopted by Indonesia in Law No. 12 of 2005). To date, however, no claims under these international instruments have been adjudicated by an Indonesian court (Evanty & Pohlman, 2018, p. 316). In relation to global norms on gender, Indonesia ratified CEDAW (1980) as early as 1984, but it has still not signed or ratified UNSCR 1325 on women, peace and security (2000). As several observers have noted, this does not imply a lack of concern in Indonesia for women in relation to peace and security. During 2015, the country launched its National Action Plan on the Empowerment and Protection of Women and Children in Social Conflicts, anchored on CEDAW, the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD), Law No. 7 on the management of social conflict, and Presidential Decree No. 8 on the protection of women during social conflict. In other words, the NAP does not refer to UNSCR 1325 as its founding document. According to members of civil society who participated in the consultations during the drafting of the NAP, the Government declared the WPS agenda not relevant to the Indonesian context, in order to avoid any association with armed conflicts and separatist/independence struggles such as those in Aceh, Papua, and Maluka (Lee-Koo & Trojanowska, 2017; Veneracion-Rallonza, 2016; both referring to Kholifah, 2014).

62

P. STOLTZ

At the time of writing in 2019, none of the Presidents since Suharto’s fall in 1998 have made dealing with the genocide of 1965 a priority. This includes President Joko (Jokowi) Widodo, who became president in 2014 on an agenda that seemed favourable to stronger human rights positions. To the disappointment of many of his progressive supporters, he did not make a formal apology during 2015, the year that marked the 50th anniversary of the 1965 violence (Evanty & Pohlman, 2018; Miller, 2018; Purdey, 2018). During the period since 1998, there have been a few attempts to launch official investigations into state crimes and redress, but all have failed. These include a 2012 report on 1965 by Komnas HAM (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, Indonesia’s National Commission for Human Rights), which was rejected by the Indonesian Attorney General’s Office (AGO). The exception to the rule is the 2007 report by The Indonesian National Commission on Violence against Women or Komisi Nasional Anti-Kekerasan terhadap Perempuan, or Komnas Perempuan, entitled ‘Gender-Based Crimes Against Humanity: Listening to the Voice of Women Survivors of 1965’ (Evanty & Pohlman, 2018; Pohlman, 2016; Wahyuningroem, 2018). The Komnas HAM report, on the other hand, did become the basis for further evidence gathering and legal arguments assembled for the International People’s Tribunal (IPT) 1965, which was held in The Hague, the Netherlands, in 2015. Another observation concerns ongoing efforts to undermine legal justice, which reflect persisting anti-Communism in Indonesia. Shortly after 1998, during the early Reformasi period, there were initiatives to address ongoing legal discrimination against those labelled ‘Communist ’. Simultaneously, however, new laws were passed that could potentially be used to continue discrimination against these same people (Evanty & Pohlman, 2018; Miller, 2018; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). This situation has continued, as will be discussed below and in Chapters 6 and 7.

3.5

Resistance to Denial in the Netherlands

We can recognize organized resistance by memory activists to the denials of responsibility related to genocide, decolonization and gendered security by both the Indonesian and Dutch governments, as I have exemplified them above. Global and local intersectional inequalities have influenced the opportunities (or the lack thereof) for the mobilization of these activists (as I will discuss in the remainder of this study) and evolving

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

63

global ideas and norms of transitional justice provide a background to how, why, when and where different activists choose different strategies. Let me here provide examples of organized resistance to these governments that are relevant as a background to the following chapters. I will conclude by addressing whether we can understand such resistance as translations or appropriations of global norms on transitional justice. Over the decades, the postcolonial diaspora in Dutch society has become increasingly mobilized in NGOs and networks engaged in struggles over recognition, restitution and reconciliation (see, e.g., Piersma, 2010; Steijlen, 2009). Some of these were concerned with legal redress from the Dutch state. As I mentioned above, for a long time Dutch governments considered persecution in the Dutch Indies/Indonesia to be irrelevant in terms of legal redress (Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010, pp. 8 and 319–331). Controversially, during the 1980s, when legal processes started to emerge that recognized the experiences of war victims from Indonesia and acknowledged ‘special solidarity’ with these victims, such legislation initially only included the experiences of the white colonial elite. This was due, amongst other things, to the governance relations between the Dutch state on the one hand and resourceful memory activism by postcolonial diasporic NGOs, which primarily consisted of these elites, on the other (Meijer, 2005, pp. 317–319; Piersma, 2010; Touwen-Bouwsma, 2010, Chapter 4 and pp. 319–331). An example of this concerned the above-mentioned issue of backpay. In her investigation of political decision-making processes concerning war victims, Piersma concluded that Eurocentrism, as well as the colonial and nationalist attitudes of some politicians, civil servants and diasporic organizations, kept issues of ‘race’, class and gender in relation to post-conflict transformations effectively off the political agenda for decades (Piersma, 2010, pp. 196–200 and 256–268). This was to the dissatisfaction of victim groups with limited resources, and over the years has led to conflicts amongst organizations (see also above on Indisch Platform 2.0). There are (and were) war victims not only in the Netherlands, but also in Indonesia. If the entanglements of the German and Japanese occupations and the Indonesian war for independence have influenced struggles over recognition and restitution of different categories of war victims in the Netherlands, then issues over the use of mass violence by the Dutch military during the war of independence were an even bigger taboo. This changed in 2011 when transnational memory activism resulted in an

64

P. STOLTZ

unanticipated judgement from The Hague Court of First Instance, concerning a large part of the male population in the West Javanese village of Rawagedeh (today called Balongsari). The Court declared that the mass execution of several hundred people (estimates vary from 150 to 430), which took place in 1947 and was carried out without trial by a Dutch military unit, was wrongful. The Court held that the Dutch state should award reparations to seven widows of these Indonesian villagers. Subsequent to the judgement, the Dutch state negotiated with the victims and came to a settlement, which included that the Netherlands should offer a formal apology. By the early 2010s, the Dutch government had still never prosecuted any soldiers for their roles in these killings (see Van den Herik, 2012). The political and legal pressure exerted upon successive Dutch governments by transnational memory activists are part of a development in which, over the last two or three decades, governments in established democracies in the Global North, such as Australia, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada, have been pressured to provide what are now seen as appropriate responses to historical injustices (Henry, 2015; Maddison & Shepherd, 2014; Mihr, 2017, p. 22; Winter, 2013, 2014). One aspect of relevance in the Dutch context concerns the transnational nature of this pressure. Critics have questioned whether the issue of appropriate responses concerns Dutch activists or politicians coping with the country’s colonial and violent past in isolation from or in dialogue with Indonesian partners. Reports about the consequences of the financial compensation for the widows of Rawagedeh/Balongsari, for example, indicated that the money had led to controversies within the village, since the compensation paid out by the Dutch state was on an individual basis amongst those claimants who were indisputable, rather than on a collective basis, in a way that included other cases. Critics also highlighted the entanglements of Dutch and Indonesian violence, which remain out of sight of legalistic approaches, such as these (‘Een onderzoek naar schuld en boete’ in NRC.nl, 22 November 2016). In 2015, the use of mass violence by the KNIL during the Indonesian war of independence drew attention from the Dutch media, following the publication of historical research by Limpach (2016) and Oostindie (2015) on the issue. New court cases also emerged, since activists and lawyers used the judgement of the Court of First Instance in The

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

65

Hague as a precedent for other, related cases. Interestingly from a gender perspective, this included the case of rape of an 18-year-old girl by five KNIL soldiers on 19 February 1949 in Peniwen, East Java. The later Mrs. Trimini brought the case to the attention of a Dutch court and in 2016 she was judged eligible for compensation by the Dutch state, due to crimes against humanity (‘Tijd voor grondig onderzoek naar het Indische verleden’, NRC.nl, 29 January 2016). In order to avoid this case also becoming a precedent, the Dutch state appealed this crime against humanity, on the grounds that the case was prescribed. Around the same period, in 2015, the governments of Japan and the Republic of Korea made an agreement about the issue of ‘comfort women’ (see above). The partners concluded this agreement without any consultation with survivors, as part of a larger attempt to erase memories of past sexual violence by military personnel in order to deepen security alliances (Motoyama, 2018). This development led to demands by Dutch survivors of Japanese sexual violence that they wanted apologies. It also led to an intensification of transnational activism by De Stichting Japanse Ereschulden [The Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts] on behalf of the women (Nos Nieuws, 2015). This included participation in an attempt by an international commission, under the leadership of a South Korean team, to nominate ‘voices of comfort women’ to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. As well as South Korea and the Netherlands, there were also teams from Indonesia, East Timor, Japan, China, Taiwan and the Philippines engaged in this effort (Stichting Japanse Ereschulden, n.d). The World Register documents heritage of ‘world significance and outstanding universal value’ (UNESCO, 2017).

3.6

Resistance to Denial in Indonesia

Contemporary Indonesian activism concerning memories of the human rights abuses and violence that occurred during the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian Revolution is an understudied topic. This might be because this activism is limited compared to activism in relation to memories of the genocide of 1965. However, as I will also address in Chapter 6, we can relate the memories of these abuses and the windows of opportunity for struggles for truth, recognition and reconciliation to each other. An exception to the rule that there is a gap in research about activism concerning the Japanese occupation is the work by McGregor and Mackie on Indonesian activism on behalf of the so-called ‘comfort women’

66

P. STOLTZ

(Mackie, 2005; McGregor, 2016a, 2016b). As has already become clear, we can understand this activism as part of a global protest movement that appeared in the wake of the emergence of a global norm on gender, peace and security during the 1990s. From this period onwards, a small number of women from Asia and the Netherlands publicly identified themselves as survivors of the enforced prostitution imposed by the Japanese military, supported by lawyers, women’s rights activists and other claimants for wartime damages. The movement became transnational by means of networks of people across the region of East and South-East Asia (Mackie, 2005; McGregor, 2013, 2016b). Indonesian activism has been far more limited than in other parts of Asia, such as Japan and Korea, but it is relevant to highlight the power relations between these transnational activists in the context of this study. This activism suffers from the same type of inequalities in power between the Global North and the Global South, and entanglements of memories of colonialism and of several violent conflicts, as I mentioned in Sect. 3.1. There were complex local and colonial cultures of patriarchy that enabled the system of sexual violence and sexual service industries near military bases to operate in the first place, and this influenced the following struggles for recognition of the victims. Initial struggles over ‘comfort women’ prioritized crimes against Dutch and Eurasian women over crimes against Indonesian women. McGregor and Mackie date this back to the Dutch-sponsored post-war tribunals and to a lack of support from successive Indonesian governments due to the complex Japanese-Indonesian relations after Indonesian independence (see also sect. 3.2). Over the years, and with some exceptions, there has been little joint Dutch and Indonesian activism due to these ongoing tensions in the former colonial relationship between the two groups of activists. Overall, Korean and Japanese activist support has reinforced Dutch and Indonesian activism and continued to push for greater solidarity across the transnational movement for redress for survivors (Mackie, 2005; McGregor, 2013, 2016b). It is not only colonial ties that have influenced Indonesian activism. Critique of sexual violence by military staff could be a sensitive issue during the authoritarian military rule of the New Order period, since this could potentially refer to violence by military staff during the Japanese occupation, as well as to the mass violence by Indonesian military staff during 1965–1968 (McGregor, 2013, 2016b). Generally, subsequent governments have combined strategies of ‘not mentioning the war’ (as in not mentioning human rights abuses in any of the three violent conflicts

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

67

addressed in this study) with a narrative of nation building. According to this narrative, heroic Indonesian nationalists won the war of independence against the Dutch villains, and the military regime of President Suharto saved the country from the evil Indonesian Communist Party by restoring order and bringing welfare to the state. An often-used example of this last hegemonic narrative of antiCommunist propaganda were the state-endorsed novel and film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the September 30 Movement/PKI). The September 30 Movement refers to the night of 30 September 1965, when a small group of army officers, with the help of a few leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI or Partai Komunis Indonesia), murdered six generals and a lieutenant on suspicion of preparing an action against President Sukarno. These events have been explained in various ways, but the army immediately declared this a coup by the PKI, leading to the destruction of the PKI and the murder, imprisonment or persecution of its real and alleged members. The power of President Sukarno gradually diminished, until in 1967 General Suharto formally took over as President. Each year since the release of the propaganda film Pengkhianatan G30S/ PKI in 1984, the film was shown on 1 October in schools and screened on television during the annual commemoration of the elimination of the PKI and the victory of the military regime (Heryanto, 2006; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, p. 1). After the fall of the New Order regime in 1998, this official version of history began to be subjected to greater public discussion (see also Chapter 6 of this study). Unfortunately, also under democratic rule, the Indonesian state has persistently resisted legal justice and, according to Evanty and Pohlman, there seems to be diminishing support for legal measures for justice (see above; Evanty & Pohlman, 2018, p. 312). Despite this, memory activists have continued to work with victims and affected communities, just as they did in the years leading up to 1998, and in the two decades since the beginning of Reformasi. Human rights NGOs and victims’ groups have been organizing work around public campaigns, claims for reparations (including legal advocacy on victims’ rights) and calls for policy reforms, at both local and national levels (Pohlman, 2016; Wahyuningroem, 2013; 2018, pp. 336–337). Under President Joko Widodo—who came to power in 2014—there have been new efforts to address the 1965 violence through non-judicial measures (Evanty & Pohlman, 2018, p. 312). Activists have engaged with oral history projects,

68

P. STOLTZ

memorials, exhibitions and other cultural expressions as local and transnational strategies to uncover the truth and struggle for recognition and reconciliation (McGregor, 2016b, 2018; Pohlman, 2016; Wahyuningroem, 2013, 2018). Two of the more internationally renowned examples of this type of activism are the documentary films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). The Act of Killing centres on the perpetrators of the 1965–1966 killings, while The Look of Silence follows how a man— born after the genocide—confronts the killers who murdered his brother during these events. Anonymous Indonesian filmmakers made the films with the help of American director Joshua Oppenheimer (see Dragojlovic, 2018; Ten Brink & Oppenheimer, 2012; Tyson, 2015; Wandita, 2014; Wieringa, 2014). Both documentaries received numerous film awards, and the global attention that this brought to the issue of the 1965 genocide contributed directly to the organization of the International People’s Tribunal 1965 in 2015 (see Narrative Report of the IPT 1965 International People’s Tribunal, 2016). The 50th anniversary of the 1965 genocide in 2015 brought about a period of hyper-activity for research and activism, which coincided with a period of hope for change under the new presidency of Joko Widodo (Purdey, 2018). At the same time, this also brought up tensions over the place of Communism in the past, present and future of Indonesia. AntiCommunism has been persistent in Indonesia, and President Widodo continued to face pressure from outspoken anti-Communist groups and many on the right and centre of Indonesian politics in the wake of public discussion of the possibility/risk of an official public apology to victims during commemorations. This culminated in a number of significant cases of censorship, including the forced cancellation of several events at the Ubud Readers’ and Writers’ Festival in October 2015. It seems to critics such as Wieringa and Katjasungkana (2019), Miller (2018), and Boellstorff (2016) that the wave of anti-Communism leading up to the commemorations in 2015 represented the beginning of a new phase of more intense anti-Communist politics. This anti-Communism continues to be an ideology in the service of oppression, not only to justify the mass killings of the 1960s and to limit open discussion of the brutality and oppression of the Suharto years, but also to justify the suppression of opposition to the contemporary regime and to hold back social reform.

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

69

3.7 Norm Translation, Appropriation and Contestation The responses of successive Dutch governments to the trauma of the German and Japanese occupations and the Indonesian war for independence were public policies, which told strategic narratives based on emotions of solidarity, ‘honour’ and ‘debt’ towards a select few war victims. These emotions were used to re/create a Dutch affective community in which a future welfare state was more important than memories of war (see Hutchison, 2016, 2019; Miskimmon et al., 2013; see also Chapter 2 of this study). Norms of (‘special ’) solidarity were linked in these strategies to norms about universal welfare rather than to emerging norms of transitional justice, as these relate to genocide, decolonization and gender. This observation seems to be relevant throughout the whole period of study between 1942 and 2015. It indicates that we can understand the strategies of successive Dutch governments as continued contestations of global transitional justice norms. This is remarkable, given the otherwise strong Dutch support for human rights and the UN. In the above, we can also detect that there are ‘silences’ within ‘silences’ in the resistance to denials and contestations of global norms. Postcolonial diaspora organizations, victims’ groups and transnational memory activists have reacted to the Dutch contestations in different ways. Recently, judicial transitional justice measures have emerged as a successful strategy for some of these activists. Others continue to have difficulties making their voices heard. The research by Piersma on political decision-making about these traumatic memories concludes that it is due to Eurocentric and colonial attitudes amongst (some) politicians and (some) diasporic organizations that issues of ‘race’, class and gender have been kept off the political agenda for decades (Piersma, 2010). We can identify this lack of recognition in the public debate about the memories of the conflicts as recently as during the mid-2010s (see Chapter 1 of this study). Just as Dutch governments have focused on building a welfare state rather than addressing traumatic memories of war and colonialism, so in turn have successive Indonesian governments based their responses to memories of the violent conflicts upon the building of a nation. The promise of independence is central to their strategic narratives, as are emotions of (national) pride. Consequently, we can also understand the

70

P. STOLTZ

strategies of these governments as continued contestations of global transitional justice norms. The constraints placed upon organized resistance in Indonesia differ from those in the Netherlands during the period under investigation, amongst other things due to the observation that Indonesia has experienced authoritarian military rule during the New Order period under President Suharto (1966–1998). This took place between two periods of democratic rule. If we focus on specific issues, then additional constraints and emotions could be relevant. McGregor (2016a), for example, highlights the importance of national shame in the limited support by Indonesian governments for Indonesian activism relating to the experiences of sexual violence of so-called ‘comfort women’ during the Japanese Occupation of the Netherlands East Indies. Indonesian activists in turn most commonly display emotions of shame, humiliation, anger, honour and dignity. McGregor argues that gender and cultural norms can provide nuances to the expression of these emotions and specific variations of them. Based on the above, I can only provide a thin analysis of the strategic narratives and norm translations of norms on genocide, colonialism and gender. However, this does suffice as background information, in that it shows that, although an argument can be made that there are ‘silences’ about the human rights abuses that took place during the three violent conflicts, there are also limits to these ‘silences’. Denials of responsibility by governments have led to activism even 50–70 years after these traumatic events, and even though this activism has taken place under constrained conditions in both societies. These constrained conditions, in turn, provide a good reason to focus on the resistances, which I will study in the remaining chapters. The above also shows the relevance, which I have already argued for earlier, of using postcolonial feminist approaches, as well as the relevance of transnational memories in addressing denials and silences.

References Boellstorff, T. (2016). Against state straightism: Five principles for including LGBT Indonesians. E-international Relations. Retrieved from http://www. e-ir.info/2016/03/21/against-state-straightism-five-principles-for-includinglgbt-indonesians/. Accessed 26 August 2019. Cohen, S. (2001). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

71

Cohen, S., & Husain, E. (2008). States of denial and the secular state. RSA Journal, 154(5534), 48–49. Cribb, R. (2010). Digital atlas of Indonesian history. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. De Swaan, A. (2004). Zorg en de staat. Welzijn, onderwijs en gezondheidszorg in Europa en de Verenigde Staten in de nieuwe tijd [Care and the state. Welfare, education and healthcare in Europe and the United States in the new era] (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Dragojlovic, A. (2018). Violent histories and embodied memories: Affectivity of ‘The Act of Killing’ and ‘The Look of Silence’. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 269–286). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Evanty, N., & Pohlman, A. (2018). After 1965: Legal matters for justice? In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 311–334). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Finnemore, M., & Sikkink, K. (1998). International norm dynamics and political change. International Organization, 52(4), 887–917. George, N., & Shepherd, L. J. (2016). Women, peace and security: Exploring the implementation and integration of UNSCR 1325. International Political Science Review, 37 (3), 297–306. Henry, N. (2013). Memory of an injustice: The ‘comfort women’ and the legacy of the Tokyo trial. Asian Studies Review, 37 (3), 362–380. Henry, N. (2015). From reconciliation to transitional justice: The contours of redress politics in established democracies. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9, 199–218. Heryanto, A. (2006). State terrorism and political identity in Indonesia: Fatally belonging. London: Routledge. Hinton, A. L. (2012). Critical genocide studies. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 7 (1), 4–15. Hutchison, E. (2016). Affective communities in world politics: Collective emotions after trauma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hutchison, E. (2019). Emotions, bodies, and the un/making of international relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47 (2), 284–298. Katzenstein, P. J. (1996). Introduction: Alternative perspectives on national security. In P. J. Katzenstein (Ed.), The culture of national security: Norms and identity in world politics (pp. 1–32). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Krasner, S. D. (1983). Structural causes and regime consequences: Regimes as intervening variables. In S. D. Krasner (Ed.), International regimes (pp. 1–21). Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Kratochwil, F., & Ruggie, J. (1986). International organization: A state of the art or an art of the state. International Organization, 40(4), 753–775.

72

P. STOLTZ

Lee-Koo, K., & Trojanowska, B. K. (2017). Does the United Nations’ women, peace and security agenda speak with, for or to women in the Asia Pacific? The development of national action plans in the Asia Pacific. Critical Studies on Security, 5(3), 287–301. Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Levy, M., Young, O., & Zürn, M. (1995). The study of international regimes. European Journal of International Relations, 1(3), 267–330. Limpach, R. (2016). De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor [The burning kampongs of General Spoor]. Amsterdam: Boom. Mackie, V. (2005). In search of innocence: Feminist historians debate the legacy of wartime Japan. Australian Feminist Studies, 20(47), 207–217. Maddison, S., & Shepherd, L. J. (2014). Peacebuilding and the postcolonial politics of transitional justice. Peacebuilding, 2(3), 253–269. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McGregor, K. (2013). Memory studies and human rights in Indonesia. Asian Studies Review, 37 (3), 350–361. McGregor, K. (2016a). Emotions and activism for former so-called ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese occupation of the Netherlands East Indies. Women’s Studies International Forum, 54, 67–78. McGregor, K. (2016b). Transnational and Japanese activism on behalf of Indonesian and Dutch victims of enforced military prostitution during World War II. The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, 14(7), 1–21. McGregor, K. (2018). Heads from the north: Transcultural memorialization of the 1965 Indonesian killings at the National Gallery of Australia. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 235–252). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Meijer, H. (2005). Indische rekening. Indië, Nederland en de backpay-kwestie 1945–2005 [Indies bill. The Dutch East Indies, the Netherlands and the 1945–2005 backpay issue]. Amsterdam: Boom. Meijer, H. (2007). Backpay: De oneindige strijd om een koloniale erfenis [Backpay: The infinite struggle for a colonial legacy]. In E. Bogaerts & R. Raben, (Eds.), Van Indië tot Indonesië [From the Dutch East Indies to Indonesia] (pp. 121–132). Amsterdam: Boom. Melvin, J., & Pohlman, A. (2018). A case for genocide: Indonesia, 1965–1966. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 27–47). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Mihr, A. (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 1–28). London: Routledge.

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

73

Miller, S. (2018). Zombie anti-communism? Democratization and the demons of Suharto-era politics in contemporary Indonesia. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 287–310). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2013). Strategic narratives: Communication power and the new world order. London: Routledge. Motoyama, H. (2018). Formulating Japan’s UNSCR 1325 national action plan and forgetting the ‘comfort women’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20(1), 39–53. Oostindie, G. (2011). Postcolonial Netherlands: Sixty-five years of forgetting, commemorating, silencing. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Oostindie, G. (2015). Soldaat in Indonesië 1945–1950: Getuigenissen van een oorlog aan de verkeerde kant van de geschiedenis [Soldier in Indonesia 1945–1950: Testimonies of a war on the wrong side of history]. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Piersma, H. (2010). Bevochten recht: Politieke besluitvorming rond de wetten voor oorlogsslachtoffers [Hard-won rights: Political decision-making concerning legislation for war victims]. Amsterdam: Boom. Pohlman, A. (2016). A year of truth and the possibilities for reconciliation in Indonesia. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 10(1), 60–78. Pratt, N., & Richter-Devroe, S. (2011). Critically examining UNSCR 1325 on women, peace and security: Introduction to special issue on UNSCR 1325. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 13(4), 489–503. Purdey, J. (2018). Epilogue. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 357–366). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Raben, R. (2012). On genocide and mass violence in colonial Indonesia. Journal of Genocide Research, 14(3–4), 485–502. Scagliola, S. (2012). Cleo’s ‘unfinished business’: Coming to terms with Dutch war crimes in Indonesia’s war of independence. Journal of Genocide Research, 14(3–4), 419–439. Simic, O. (Ed.). (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. London: Routledge. Steijlen, F. (2009). To the memory of comrades: Personal remembrance of Dutch war dead in Southeast Asia, 1942–45. Public History Review, 16, 64–77. Teitel, R. G. (2003). Transitional justice genealogy. Harvard Human Rights Journal, 16, 69–94. Ten Brink, J., & Oppenheimer, J. (Eds.). (2012). Killer images: Documentary film, memory and the performance of violence. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

74

P. STOLTZ

Touwen-Bouwsma, E. (2010). Op zoek naar grenzen. Toepassing en uitvoering van de wetten voor oorlogsslachtoffers [In search of limits. Application and implementation of the legislation for war victims]. Amsterdam: Boom. Tyson, A. (2015). Genocide documentary as intervention. Journal of Genocide Research, 17 (2), 177–199. UN Security Council. (2004, August 23). The rule of law on transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies. Report of the Secretary General. S/2004/616. Van den Herik, L. (2012). Addressing ‘colonial crimes’ through reparations? Journal of International Criminal Justice, 10, 693–705. Veneracion-Rallonza, M. (2016). Building the women, peace and security agenda in the ASEAN through multi-focal norm entrepreneurship. Global Responsibility to Protect, 8(2–3), 158–179. Wahyuningroem, S. (2013). Seducing for truth and justice: Civil society initiatives for the 1965 mass violence in Indonesia. Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, 32(3), 115–142. Wahyuningroem, S. (2018). Working from the margins: Initiatives for truth and reconciliation for victims of the 1965 mass violence in Solo and Palu. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian Genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 335–356). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Wandita, G. (2014). PREMAN NATION: Watching ‘The Act of Killing’ in Indonesia. Critical Asian Studies, 46(1), 167–170. Wieringa, S. E. (2014). Persisting silence: Sexual slander, mass murder, and ‘The Act of Killing’. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(3), 50–76. Wieringa, S., & Katjasungkana, N. (2019). Propaganda and the genocide in Indonesia: Imagined evil. New York, NY: Routledge. Willems, W. (2001). De uittocht uit Indië. 1945–1995 [The exodus from the Dutch East Indies. 1945–1995]. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bert Bakker. Willett, S. (2010). Introduction: Security Council Resolution 1325: Assessing the impact on women, peace and security. International Peacekeeping, 17 (2), 142–158. Winter, S. (2013). Towards a unified theory of transitional justice. The International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7, 224–244. Winter, S. (2014). Transitional justice in established democracies: A political theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zwingel, S. (2016). Translating international women’s rights: The CEDAW convention in context. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zwingel, S. (2017). Women’s rights norms as content-in-motion and incomplete practice. Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal, 2(5), 675–690.

3

TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE NORMS …

75

Primary sources International People’s Tribunal. (2016). Narrative report of the IPT 1965. Retrieved from https://www.tribunal1965.org/en/narrative-report-of-theipt-1965/. Accessed 19 June 2016. IPT 1965 Foundation. (2017). Final report of the IPT 1965: Findings and documents of the international people’s tribunal on crimes against humanity in Indonesia 1965. Bandung: Ultimus. Kholifa, D. R. (2014, April 8). Indonesian implementation of UNCSR 1325: Adapting to the national context. Retrieved from https://www. womenpeacemakersprogram.org/news/indonesian-implementation-of-unscr1325-adapting-to-the-national-context/ (unable to access). Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport. (2018a, Junie 26). Evaluatie Uitkeringsregeling Backpay (Eindrapport) [Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. (2018a, June 26). Evaluation payment scheme backpay (Final report)]. Amsterdam. Publicatienr. 18021. Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport. (2018b). Regeling van de Staatssecretaris van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport van 8 juni 2018, kenmerk 1355298-177370-DMO, houdende regels voor de subsidiëring van activiteiten in het kader van de collectieve erkenning van Indisch en Moluks Nederland (Subsidieregeling collectieve erkenning van Indisch en Moluks Nederland) [Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. (2018b). Regulation of the State Secretary for Health, Welfare and Sport of 8 June 2018, reference 1355298177370-DMO, containing rules for subsidizing activities in the context of the collective recognition of Indisch and Moluccan Netherlands (Subsidy scheme collective recognition of Indisch and Moluccan Netherlands)]. Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport. (2018c, Juni 29). Kamerbrief over Evaluatie Uitkeringsregeling Backpay en subsidieregeling collectieve erkenning Indisch en Moluks Nederland. Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport, Kenmerk 1373094-178640-DMO [Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. (2018c, June 29). Letter to Parliament on the Evaluation of the Backpay Benefit Scheme and subsidy scheme for collective recognition of the Indisch and Moluccan Netherlands. Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, Attribute 1373094-178640-DMO]. Nos Nieuws. (2015). Ook Nederlandse ‘troostmeisjes’ willen nu excuses [Dutch ‘comfort women’ now also want to receive apologies]. Nos Nieuws. Retrieved from https://nos.nl/artikel/2077527-ook-nederlandse-troostmeisjes-willennu-excuses.html. Accessed 5 March 2019. Stichting Japanse Ereschulden. (n.d). Unesco heeft nominatie Voices of Comfort Women aangehouden voor verdere dialog [The Foundation of Japanese Honorary Debts. (n.d.). Unesco has kept the nomination of voices of comfort women for further dialogue]. Retrieved from http://www.japanse-

76

P. STOLTZ

ereschulden.nl/unesco-nominatie-voices-of-comfort-women/. Accessed 13 March 2019. UN General Assembly Resolution 260. (1948). The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. UNESCO. (2017). Memory of the world register. Retrieved from http:// www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-theworld/register. Accessed 13 March 2019.

CHAPTER 4

Silence, Violence and Gendered Resistance

‘All right, all right,’ I said, and Saskia burst into tears. Between sobs I was given to understand that besides being in therapy she was attending gatherings with a bunch of people who’d been through the same experiences as her. They reminisced together and felt collectively misunderstood. Most of them had been interned in some Japanese camp with their mothers, but some of them were born after the war. ‘Our parents keep mum, that goes for all of us children.’ ‘Children?’ ‘We were children then,’ Saskia said. ‘You should come to one of our meetings some time. Do you good.’ ‘I’m fine.’ ‘Don’t you remember what it was like with your father, when we were living by the seaside, how the war went on from morning till night?’ My ears pricked up at that. (van Dis, 1994/2004, pp. 74–75) [‘Ja, ja.’ Zei ik, en Saskia huilde. Tussen het snikken door begreep ik dat ze niet alleen bij de psychiater liep, ze ontmoette er een hele club generatiegenoten, samen ervaringen uitwisselen en je onbegrepen voelen. Het merendeel had in een Japans interneringskamp gezeten, maar er waren er ook na de oorlog geboren. ‘We hebben allemaal zwijgende ouders, dat geldt voor alle kinderen.’ ‘Kinderen?’ ‘Kinderen van toen,’ zei Saskia,’en jij moet ook.’

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_4

77

78

P. STOLTZ

‘Ik heb nergens last van.’ ‘Maar thuis, aan zee, met je vader, bij ons hield de oorlog toch nooit op?’ Ik was meteen weer bij het gesprek.] (van Dis, 1994, p. 78)

A second generation can struggle to relate to silences in narratives about the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before (see Hirsch, 2012; Suleiman, 2002). Silences can concern aspects of individual and collective memories that are untold (‘our parents keep mum’ as it says in the quote above). Although this appears to suggest a lack of voice or agency, silence can certainly involve both agency and resistance. Individuals, groups and states can use silence as well as voice strategically, to enable a transition from a traumatic past into the future. We saw in the previous chapter how moral and political denials of responsibility by governments could create silences about the colonial past and the violent conflicts of the 1940s in Dutch and Indonesian societies. Activists can use silence in protest marches in order to make an impact. Victims—as well as perpetrators—can also use silence; for example, to resist engaging in conversations about experiences of violence when they feel unsafe. In all cases, we can recognize agency in these silences. For first- and second-generation postcolonial migrants, such as the characters in the quote above, silence can influence their sense of self and identity. For a second generation, it can lead to everyday forms of resistance to silence in a search for roots, truth and reconciliation. Feminist thought on silence, voice and agency in security studies and memory studies have emphasized that silences about gender in the study of memories and security hinder gendered experiences from emerging (see Chapter 2). Recent studies argue that the links between silence, voice and agency are more complex than they appear from an equation between silence as bad and voice as good (Hansen, 2019; Hayes, 2011; Hirsch, 2012; Parpart & Parashar, 2019; Sylvester, 2019). This calls for tools to study the connections between silence, voice and agency. In this chapter, I argue that combining an intersectional analysis of inequalities (following Phoenix, 2017; Yuval-Davis, 2011) with queer approaches to diaspora (following Hayes, 2011, 2016) can be useful in the study of how these notions relate to each other in narratives of transnational memories of violence. I use the research questions that I introduced in Chapter 1 and illustrate my argument with examples from the Dutch novel Indische duinen (1994) or My Father’s War by Adriaan van Dis (van Dis, 1994/2004, transl. Ina Rilke). The results show that

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

79

the use of simplistic understandings of the different characters as either victims or perpetrators influences the formation of their respective diasporic identities. Moreover, intersectional inequalities hinder the agency of first and subsequent generations of postcolonial migrants and their opportunities to resist denials of responsibility.

4.1

Silence, Voice and Agency

There is a tendency amongst feminist scholars to assume that silence and voice are related, and that, in this dichotomy, silence is bad and voice is good. In this study, I emphasize the role of everyday resistance to silence and denial in narratives about memories of violent conflicts, so one would expect that I subscribe to this idea, but it is not the assumption from which I work here. Silence and voice both have an impact upon how we understand and study agency. Although voices about memories of violence and atrocities might very well be a good representation of women’s agency, for example, it is equally important to recognize that silence about sexual violence can mean many things, including being an expression of agency. Silence might indicate that there is no problem to be spoken about, but it might also be a survival strategy employed by somebody who is endangered and who might have put their experience of memories of political or sexual violence into words, had the structural circumstances been different (see Hansen, 2019, p. 31; Parpart & Parashar, 2019). Silence can also be a way to hide the acts of perpetrators or it can reflect the confusion that may result from being both victim and perpetrator. We will not know which of these silences is relevant to our interests as researchers, unless we try to find out. Therefore, rather than understanding silence and voice as either/or, they can also be understood as interwoven (see Acheson, 2008; Hirsch, 2012; Parpart & Parashar, 2019). Thinking from within the research field of feminist security studies, Hansen has pointed out that the dichotomy between silence and voice, or speech, is political, epistemological, ontological and methodological (Hansen, 2019, p. 27). It is political because feminist scholars long ago unveiled the silencing and marginalization of gendered threats at national and global levels (see Chapter 3 in this book). The dichotomy is epistemological because we can only know about gendered insecurity problems if those who experience them have a space where their voices can be heard (see Hansen, 2019, p. 27). When, for example, the first generation of

80

P. STOLTZ

those with experiences of the political and sexual violence of the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian war of independence do not gain such space in the Netherlands, then others will not know or learn about this violence. It is ontological because speech, or the refusal to allow someone a voice, forms one’s subjectivity in relation to others. The agency of a first generation could be at stake, for example, in Dutch society. In addition, ontological and political dimensions of the dichotomy between silence and voice imply that raising one’s voice and speaking up connects individual subjectivities with others. This can enable these voices to make political demands relating to insecurities and past atrocities (see Chapter 3 for the constraints upon organized resistance against silence in the Netherlands). Finally, written language, such as in a novel or a diary, enable us, methodologically, to study the performance of subjectivities and security threats and gain knowledge about how these are made social (see Hansen, 2019, p. 27). Importantly, there is a dilemma in the silence/speech dichotomy, which Hansen calls the silent security dilemma. The challenge that feminist security studies have to face, she argues, is how to deal with an epistemology of spoken experience on the one hand, and the possibility that structural conditions circumscribe speech on the other (Hansen, 2019, p. 31). The relevant structural conditions in the context of the analysis of the novel Indische duinen and the Netherlands include patriarchy and structuralized racism. In her exploration of dominant white Dutch self-representation, Wekker highlighted paradoxes of colonialism and race, which she suspects are also operative in other international settings that have an imperial history. The paradox in this white Dutch self-representation concerns a forceful denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence, which co-exists alongside racism. This results in social narratives about what Wekker calls the white innocence and ignorance about the Dutch colonial past amongst the white population of the country. This ‘innocence’ safeguards white privilege (Jaffe, 2018; Wekker, 2016). An additional structural condition concerns the concept and narrative of generation (Hirsch, 2012; Suleiman, 2002; Weigel, 2002; for a sociological understanding of generation see Mannheim, 1927/1952). Narratives about generation raise questions about how we can divide time into periods, for example after a war (Hirsch, 2012; Suleiman, 2002; Weigel,

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

81

2002). It also raises questions about how memories travel across time, place and space. Here, the notion of diaspora and its engagement with ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ becomes relevant (Alexander, 2017; Brubaker, 2005, 2017; Gilroy, 1987, 1993). Below, I will proceed as follows. Firstly, I argue that intersections of inequalities of race, nation, age and generation influence the opportunities to negotiate hybrid diasporic identities differently for different groups of postcolonial migrants. I illustrate this by taking my starting point in the perspective of the main character in the novel, a second-generation postcolonial migrant, whom I here call A (since the ‘I’ character in the book is not called by a name and van Dis often wrote about his Indonesian roots while using other names) and by answering my first research question: who are the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in the narratives? (see Chapter 1 on the research questions). Although the strategic construction of boundaries and the crossing of borders of identity differ, at the same time what leads identities to change, for whom they change and why, is often unclear (Phoenix, 2017). In light of the above-described Dutch self-representation of ‘white innocence’ and silence about the colonial past, this raises the question of what it means for A to be constructed as white, and what it means for other postcolonial migrants; for example, those of the first generation. This is especially interesting because whiteness is part of complex hybrid and diasporic identities and neither places of origin nor arrival remain unchanged. Secondly, I suggest that understanding diaspora from a queer perspective (following Hayes, 2011, 2016) can help to problematize the gendered aspects of a search for narratives about roots in diasporic identity and the geographical trajectories of the routes of transnational memories (see Gilroy, 1987, 1993 on roots and routes). Researchers such as Hayes working at the intersection of queer theory and postcolonial studies have introduced the term queer diaspora (Hayes, 2016). This approach can challenge narratives that tell a linear story focusing on patriarchal and colonial father–son relations as the basis for individual and collective identities. Rather, by queering diasporic identities, it becomes possible to propose alternative and multiple roots that ground an identity in sexual diversity, as well as diversity in general (see Hayes, 2011, 2016). As I will show in the next section, this is already relevant when considering the differences between the Dutch and English titles of the novel (Indische duinen and My Father’s War). I will illustrate my argument by answering

82

P. STOLTZ

my second research question: what does ‘A’ know about the past and how does he know what he knows about the past? Finally, I discuss how intersectional approaches to negotiations of identity and queer approaches to diaspora can complement each other. I do so by focusing on everyday resistance to silences and answering my third research question: what do ‘we’ think of past, present and future? I argue for the importance of bringing several narratives into conversation with each other when considering silence, voice and agency about the past (following Hansen, 2019; Hirsch, 2012). We can offer readings of silence, but no single reading can be considered ‘best’ or can foreclose the possibility that there might be other readings of silence, speech, subjectivities and agency (Hansen, 2019, pp. 31–33; also Spivak, 1988). Still, it becomes important to ask what diaspora is for, when A and other characters in the novel engage with routes and roots. I illustrate the argument by showing how, by means of everyday resistance to individual and collective silences and denials, the main character, A, considers strategies to deal with the past and the present that differ from the strategies of other characters in the novel, such as his sister Jana and their mother.

4.2

Indische duinen vs. My Father ’s War

Dutch cultural memorializations of colonialism and the conflicts of the 1940s in Indonesia were not prominent during the 1950s and 1960s, but increasingly emerged in literature and visual mass media from the 1970s onwards (Pattynama, 2014, pp. 11–12, 27–29). Since the early 1980s, second-generation postcolonial migrant writers in the Netherlands have written about memories of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies during WWII (Pattynama, 2012, p. 187). One of the most famous of these novels is the partly autobiographical Indische duinen by Adriaan van Dis (1994). The novel is set in the Netherlands in the early 1990s and is told from the perspective of a 47-year-old, male, second-generation, postcolonial migrant, whom I here call A. He has no first-hand experience of the violence in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian war of independence because his parents and half-sisters migrated to the Netherlands in the late 1940s, shortly before he was born. A’s father—Justin, a veteran of the Royal Dutch Indies Army [the KNIL, het Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger]—dies when A is

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

83

eleven. A’s upbringing is characterized by an atmosphere of sorrow, which he tries to understand, but has difficulty in grasping. How can he make sense of what has happened and of himself? How can he establish agency and the moral authority to address this past and thus find strategies to give the memories of violence a place in the present and the future? These questions become acute when two of his half-sisters, Ada and Jana, die from cancer in the 1990s, shortly after each other. The Dutch title of the novel, Indische duinen, refers to the sand dunes [duinen] on the North Sea coast where A was raised, and to which he returns to contemplate unresolved issues. In the novel, these often result from the memories that his relatives carried with them from overseas in Indonesia to the shores and the sand dunes of the Netherlands. The other word, Indisch, has two meanings, both of which are common in Dutch society, as well as in research. Neither of these meanings is wholly satisfactory and both entail ambiguities. One meaning uses Indisch to imply something colonial from the past in the Dutch East Indies (in all its complexity), while the other refers Indisch to Mestizo or mixed racial origin, which is less bound to time and place (Bosma & Raben, 1996, p. xiv; de Vries, 2009, pp. 14–15). Importantly, the title of the English translation of the novel is My Father’s War. This puts the focus on the specific relationship between father and son. This is unfortunate, I argue, because this title only represents a limited version of family relations and does not capture the wider range of perspectives that the novel offers on notions of diaspora, gender, race and nation in memories of war. A has three half-sisters: Ada, Jana and Saskia. At the beginning of the novel A, his mother and Saskia are gathered round the deathbed of Ada, together with Ada’s husband and son. Her death arouses memories about the death of his father and the relationships within the family. The father of A and the father of his sisters were born on the same day and they had the same name, Justin. To differentiate between them, they were called Just I and Just II. Justin van Capellen, or Just I, was the half-sisters’ father. He was first lieutenant of the Royal Dutch Indies Army and van Dis describes him as an ‘Indo boy’ (van Dis, 1994, p. 30; 1994/2004, p. 26; [een Indische jongen]), which he explains is what you were known as when you were dark-skinned and born in Indonesia. You always remained a ‘boy’ [jongen], regardless of how grand you looked in photos in your uniform (van Dis, 1994, p. 30; 1994/2004, p. 26).

84

P. STOLTZ

A’s own father, Just II, was in the same army, but had a lower rank. van Dis describes him as short, handsome, bald and not at all as dark as Just I. According to his father’s own description, Just II had a ‘tropical tan’ (van Dis, 1994, p. 30; 1994/2004, p. 27; [tropengeel ]), which he claimed was due to the climate, since the sun along the equator shines right through your clothes. His family had remained purely European (van Dis, 1994, p. 30; 1994/2004, p. 30; [pur sang ]) after six generations in the Indies. A fears that this skin colour was very important to his father, since he preferred to consider himself a ‘Dutch chap’ (van Dis, 1994, p. 31; 1994/2004, p. 27; [Hollandse vent ]), and not a boy. For A, the strategic identification of his father and his own struggle with his identity is complex in a different way, as we will see below. A’s mother had moved from the Netherlands to Indonesia, and repatriated with Just II and her three daughters in the late 1940s. Upon her return to the country of her birth, she did not know what had happened to Just I, because she had last seen him in 1942 and the information from the Red Cross was severely delayed (van Dis, 1994, p. 13; 1994/2004, p. 10). During the Japanese occupation, mother and daughters were interned in three successive camps in Sumatra. First, they were placed under house arrest at Fort de Kock with five families, then they were moved to an intermediate camp, followed by a prison called Boei in Padang and finally a barracks camp Bankinang. They were kept in these camps throughout the Japanese occupation (van Dis, 1994, pp. 39– 42; 1994/2004, pp. 34–39). Mother and daughters met Just II after the Japanese had lost the war, during the Indonesian war of independence, while they were still living in the camp, but now under freer circumstances. More than a year after the end of WWII, the mother had officially learned that Just I had passed away. Following this news, she had to fight the authorities for years in order to receive overdue payments of his salary and pension (see sect. 3.3 about backpay). An Indo boy [Indische jongen], who had fought on the side of the Dutch as opposed to the Japanese and the Indonesian nationalists, raised the suspicion of civil servants (van Dis, 1994, pp. 76–77; 1994/2004, pp. 72–73). When his mother pointed out that her husband had held Dutch citizenship and had fought for queen and country, and that he had been part of the resistance, the answer would be:

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

85

Resistance against the Japanese? Dear lady, there was no such thing. Dutch nationals were interned, they had no means of resistance. (van Dis, 1994/2004, p. 73) [Verzet tegen de Japanners? Maar mevrouwtje, dat bestond niet! De Nederlanders werden geïnterneerd, ze konden zich helemaal niet verzetten.] (van Dis, 1994, p. 77)

It took five years before A’s mother received the pension, after her notary had found witnesses who attested that her husband had fought on the right side. In addition, he was suddenly deemed a war hero, was rehabilitated in the newspaper and received the highest military honour, de Militaire Willems-Orde. A’s mother received an offer to obtain and dispatch the decoration upon receipt of 36.20 guilders. A remembers his mother explaining that first she was supposed to be ashamed, after which she was supposed to buy his heroism. She had written to tell the minister that he could wear it himself. After this, A’s mother remained silent. She never complained, he notes, not even when A asked her about her camp experiences. She would say nothing more than that she was always hungry—which she described as a weird feeling—but that otherwise they had laughed a lot (van Dis, 1994, p. 77; 1994/2004, pp. 73–74). ‘Sudah, never mind’ (van Dis, 1994, p. 77; 1994/2004, p. 74; [Soedah, laat maar]). A’s sister Ada had always been cool, intelligent and averse to emotions. She never mentioned her experiences in the camp when other people started to talk about it. His other sister, Saskia, was the opposite. A remarks that every little pain she had, had its roots in Bankinang. Ada and their mother did not tolerate this (van Dis, 1994, p. 44; 1994/2004, p. 41). Jana, the oldest sister, emigrated to Canada as soon as she turned 18 (van Dis, 1994, p. 31; 1994/2004, p. 27). When Jana is diagnosed with cancer, A, his mother and Saskia pay her a visit shortly before she dies. Eventually, A learns more about the experiences his mother and sisters had in the camp by means of Ada’s hidden camp diaries, which he finds after her death (van Dis, 1994, pp. 38–46; 1994/2004, pp. 34–43). These diaries lead him to speculate about possible sexual violence that his sisters may have suffered at the hands of the Japanese and possibly his father. The diaries also lead him to search for answers to questions about

86

P. STOLTZ

his father’s war experiences and the political violence from which he suffered. He knows little of these, and Ada’s camp diaries only cover the period prior to her first encounter with his father.

4.3 Intersectionality, Boundary-Making and Border Crossings Narrations are important for formations of self and identity. These can be located in local, relational and interactive practices in everyday life. However, we can only begin to tell the whole story of who we are by integrating so-called ‘small story’ perspectives with ‘big story’ perspectives (Freeman, 2011; see also Bamberg, 2011). Structural conditions and ‘big story’ perspectives matter because they can circumscribe speech and determine what a person can and cannot say about their identity. We can see, for example, how in the novel A negotiates a hybrid identity and a sense of belonging to several communities and groupings by searching for access to both private and public memories about the Japanese occupation. Nowadays, identity scholars agree that theorizing identity can start with assumptions that there are multiple identities, which are in constant flux. They also agree that ‘insider’ understandings do not necessarily correspond to ‘outsider’ constructions and that there are differences between people within any social identity category, as well as commonalities across groups that are constructed as different. However, as Phoenix points out, despite these common understandings, it is less clear what leads identities to change, for whom they change or why (Phoenix, 2017; see Brubaker, 2016). Here, an intersectional analysis of the influence of inequalities in power upon identity formation becomes useful. Intersectionality refers to the insight that the social categories of race, gender, nation, generation and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but rather as reciprocally constructing phenomena (see Hill Collins, 2015). Bringing different categories into conversation with each other works from the understanding that they are all part of each other’s histories and representations (Wekker, 2016, p. 24). Power relations matter in the construction of boundaries. What I would like to emphasize here is that intersectional inequalities influence the opportunities to negotiate hybrid diasporic identities differently for different groups of postcolonial migrants.

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

87

This brings us to the issue of what it means for categories to be socially constructed. It raises the question of what it means for a secondgeneration postcolonial migrant such as A to be white, and what it means for other characters in the novel, such as first-generation postcolonial migrants. This is especially interesting because whiteness is part of a complex set of hybrid and diasporic identities, and neither places of origin nor arrival remain unchanged (see Alexander, 2017; Brubaker, 2016; Phoenix, 2017). Let me illustrate this argument with the help of my first research question about identity: who are the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in Indische duinen? Does the novel’s main character, A, describe power relations within events and contexts in the past? If so, according to which categories? Does A highlight tensions between individual and collective identities? I will answer this with the help of two examples from the novel, one illustrating an argument about the construction of boundaries and the second illustrating an argument about border crossings and strategies to negotiate identities. I start with an example of boundary making. …Els… ‘You’re a real totok, you are. As Dutch as they come. So ignorant.’ (van Dis, 1994/2004, p. 128) […Els…’Je bent een echte totok, hè, jij weet niets.’ ] (van Dis, 1994, p. 131)

Els is an old friend of A’s sister Jana. In a conversation about the smuggled notes that Jana had sent to Els in a Japanese camp, in this quote she describes A as unable to understand the horrors of the past because he occupies a different position from her and Jana in present-day Dutch society. Els sees him as a totok (defined below), and emphasizes that he does not belong to the ‘us’ of first-generation postcolonial migrants with firsthand experiences of war and colonialism (see Hirsch, 2012; Suleiman, 2002; Weigel, 2002 on generation). Here, the intersectionality of inequalities of race, nation, age and generation influence the strategic formation of boundaries of identity, as captured in the word totok. The strategies of naming of racial formations with a connection to the colonial past in Indonesia—such as the use of the term totok, but also other names, as will be apparent in the next chapter— remain complex and politically and socially sensitive in the Netherlands. Totok is an Indonesian term and its meaning often relates to colonial discourses of ethnic and ‘racial’ categories of ‘whiteness ’ and national categories of ‘Dutch’ or ‘European’. In her study of second- and

88

P. STOLTZ

third-generation Indische Nederlanders , de Vries defines the literal meaning of totok as ‘pure-bred’ or, in the colonial context, ‘full-blooded’ (de Vries, 2009, p. 385). Bosma and Raben point out that, during the colonial period, the term totok was used to refer to those of Dutch and other European origin who lived in the Dutch East Indies (European newcomers). However, the interpretation that totoks came from racially, culturally and socially homogeneous families and communities, which can be separated from the indigenous population within a strictly racially stratified colonial society, should be dismissed, they argue, since this had little to do with reality (Bosma & Raben, 1996, p. xvii). This influence of unequal power relations upon negotiations of identity is confirmed by Ann Stoler, another colonial historian, who points out that, in distinguishing race, powerful colonial agents in the Dutch East Indies could give more weight to upbringing than to paternity, more importance to bearing than to colour, and that cultural competence could garner more influence than birth. If these agents used science and law to make such distinctions, then this knowledge was often deemed inadequate. Rather, they relied on ways of knowing that depended on a reading of sensibilities and a measure of affective states of affiliation and attachment more than on science (Stoler, 2008, p. 352). In other words, during the colonial period, colonial agents used terms such as totok strategically. Els also does this in the present of the novel in the 1990s. She strategically uses the term totok to create a boundary and locate A as an outsider in his own family and as an outsider to a first generation. Whiteness, following Frankenberg, can refer to ‘a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced and, moreover, are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination.’ The effect on white people of race privilege and the dominance of whiteness is to generate their seeming normativity and structured invisibility (Frankenberg, 1993, p. 6). By naming A a totok, Els displaces his whiteness and ignorance from this unmarked status (see Wekker, 2016 on white innocence). As I mentioned above, identities are constituted through the interplay of self-identification and categorization by others. These external categorizations—and this is regardless of whether they are backed by the formal authority of a state or through informal social definitions—may limit one’s ability to secure social recognition or validation for one’s self-identification (see Brubaker, 2017; Phoenix, 2017). Els limits A’s

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

89

opportunities for self-identification in the quote, but this does not hinder him from searching for access to private as well as public memories about the Japanese occupation. A does not want to be ‘innocent’ or ‘ignorant’ about colonialism or race. His position of privilege as a white, second-generation, Dutch man provides him with certain opportunities and choices to negotiate his identity (see Kruks, 2005, 2012, Sullivan & Tuana, 2007; Wekker, 2016). This brings me to the second example in the novel, illustrating my argument about border crossings and strategies to negotiate hybrid diasporic identities. I argue that contexts of time, place and space—of the ‘then’ and ‘there’ vs. the ‘here’ and ‘now’ vs. the travelling of identity markers such as memories—influence the possibility and choice of negotiating one’s identity. This is the case because intersectional power relations matter for which stories of violence in personal, familial and cultural memories are told, or not. Power relations create tensions between individual and collective memories and also influence the possibilities for how narratives of violence are told, or not. That is, intersectional power relations influence silence, voice and agency in the formation and negotiation of identities of the first and second generations of postcolonial migrants, victims, perpetrators and bystanders (see Hirsch, 2012, pp. 15–18; Hirsch & Miller, 2011 on power relations and memories; Yuval-Davis, 2011 on intersectionality and belonging). The strategies for negotiating identities in the novel include stories about passing for ‘white’ and/or ‘brown’, ‘Dutch’ and/or ‘Indonesian’. Notions of in/security are central to the events and contexts in these stories, since the making of boundaries and a lack of belonging can result in insecurity, violence and death. Simultaneously, security can follow from belonging and may require the renegotiation of identity. The following examples illustrate strategies that serve the purpose of escaping the violence during the ‘there and then’ of the Japanese occupation and—in different ways—of relating to the ‘here and now’ of the paradoxes of colonialism and race in the dominant white Dutch selfrepresentation. First, I give an example of a strategy of racial border crossing from ‘white’ to ‘brown’ in order to obtain safety. Edmee is the half-sister of A’s father (1994, pp. 99–101; 1994/2004, pp. 96–98). In a conversation between Edmee and A, it turns out that, during the Japanese occupation, his grandfather (who was a lawyer), had with the necessary papers trumped up the Italian lover of his wife as the

90

P. STOLTZ

native father of his children. This included Edmee. It kept his grandmother, aunts and uncles out of Japanese internment camps, although not the grandfather himself, since he failed to produce a native ancestor, so he ended up behind barbed wire. A’s father had been kept out of the arrangement and was unaware of this. He was the eldest son and, as such, had been the first to be sacrificed to the colonial army, in keeping with Catholic tradition (van Dis, 1994, pp. 209–210; 1994/2004, pp. 206– 207). When the story continues, it reveals an example of opposite strategies of border crossings, from ‘brown’ to ‘white’ or from ‘Indonesian’ to ‘Dutch’. In the ‘here and now’ of the present in the novel—which is half a century later—this serves the purpose of relating to the paradoxes of colonialism and race in the dominant white Dutch self-representation of the 1990s. Both Edmee and A—as well as A’s father—attempt to negotiate their diasporic identity, but whereas: …Edmee was after purity and consoled herself with a lily-white escutcheon, I for my part was looking for the evidence of native blood because I have such pink skin, and if I didn’t watch out I’d find myself going round in the same absurd circles. That crazy longing for purity, my father, too, was infected by it, ever preoccupied with rank and class, respectability and vulgarity, right and wrong, more and less, higher and lower, left and right, strong and weak, bitter and sweet – even in the kitchen. (van Dis, 1994/2004, pp. 207–208) […Edmee zocht naar zuiverheid en troostte zich met een lelieblank blazoen. Ik zocht naar bewijzen hoe bruin we waren, omdat ik zo roze ben. Ik moest oppassen niet dezelfde dwaasheid te begaan. Die belachelijke hang naar zuiverheid, ook mijn vader was er door besmet, altijd bezig met rangen en standen, met deftig en plat, goed en kwaad, meer en minder, hoger en lager, links en rechts, sterk en slap, scherp en zoet, tot in de keuken toe.] (van Dis, 1994, p. 210)

Internal differences between people in particular racialized categories matter because, in the context of the 1990s of the Netherlands, racialized ‘border crossings’ are more open to white people and exclude those phenotypically legible as brown or Asian from inscription into whiteness (see Phoenix, 2017, p. 1316). Edmee, A’s father and A all attempt to negotiate their white identity, but whereas Edmee and A’s father (at times) feel safe in white privilege, A is afraid to fall into the trap of racial purity in his search for ‘roots ’ and ‘routes ’.

4

4.4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

91

The Queering of Roots and Routes

This brings me to my second question: what does A know about the past and how does he know what he knows about the past? Does A express imaginary or hypothetical experiences, e.g. in relation to power relations, events and contexts in the past, the present and/or the future? Since he does so (see Sect. 4.2), then this indicates some sort of knowledge about the wars in Indonesia, but he clearly also lacks knowledge. Here, the concept of diaspora becomes of interest. Diaspora as a historical and social process—and as a concept—is a moving target. It requires us to engage with both roots and routes , with the deep significance of how the then and there shape subjectivities in the here and now (Alexander, 2017; Brubakers, 2005, 2017). The intersectional analysis above reflects A’s desire to acquire a rooted postcolonial hybrid and diasporic identity. He tries to find, and become one with, his roots. This creates problems, because his preoccupation with beginnings and origins does not allow him to return to these origins with any certainty, or to know for sure that the beginnings to which he returns are not just the product of fiction or the telling of the story of that return (see Hayes, 2011, 2016, p. 1). As Hayes emphasizes, it is important to recognize both that roots are written and that they are impossible (Hayes, 2016, p. 1). Roots narratives frequently rely on the linear storytelling of a patrilineal family tree structured by heterosexual marriage and reproduction, which would seem to exclude any diversity of sexual practices or identifications. Queering diaspora challenges the heterosexuality of this family tree by proposing alternative and multiple roots that ground an identity based on not only sexual diversity but also diversity in general (Hayes, 2011, p. 73; 2016). This is important because, as we will see in Sect. 4.5, these multiple stories enable us to gain a deeper understanding of the relations between silence, voice and agency in specific narratives. Let me explain the queering of diaspora in three steps, using illustrations from the novel. Firstly, I explain how the roots narrative in the novel does not rely on a patrilineal family tree by illustrating how A relates to heterosexual marriage and reproduction and how he discovers a diversity of sexual practices and identifications. Secondly, I explain how the telling of a roots story creates the origins and the identity rooted in them. Thirdly, I explain how multiple routes of memories ground a diasporic

92

P. STOLTZ

identity by illustrating how A’s search for knowledge results in a multiplicity of stories about violence, leaving him with the task of interpreting silence, voice and agency. I start with the first step. Interestingly, A’s sexuality and partner status are hardly mentioned in the novel. Only a few short passages mention an unnamed girlfriend, whom A never sees. On one occasion this is supplemented with the remark that ‘I wasn’t cut out for domesticity and children’ [Ik deugde niet voor regelmaat en kinderen] (van Dis, 1994, pp. 123–124; 1994/2004, p. 120; see also van Dis, 1994, pp. 60, 295; 1994/2004, p. 57). In addition, the above intersectional analysis reveals a diversity of sexual practices, identifications with different partners, family constellations and identifications with different groupings in A’s root narrative. Although none of these examples explicitly indicate that A or any of his relatives are lesbian, bisexual, gay or in the closet, these illustrations do challenge the patrilineal lines of descent implied by roots. Secondly, the telling of a roots story creates both the origins and the identity rooted in them. Following Hayes (2011, p. 74), I identify two parallel narratives in the following illustrations, when A attempts to gain knowledge about his father’s violent past. Both take the form of trajectories or journeys. The first narrative begins in the past in Indonesia with knowledge about the contexts and events that A’s father experienced, and ends in the Netherlands with A finding and imagining the details of these contexts and events. Despite the white innocence and ignorance about the colonial past in Dutch society described earlier, and despite A’s initial reluctance to search for information, it is relatively easy for him to uncover facts about the ‘big story’ of political violence in books and other sources. A’s position (as well as that of van Dis) as a well-known writer (and presumably also as the son of a veteran) grant him access to veterans and other witnesses, who provide him with knowledge about his father’s past. He writes about his search and describes his findings. A describes how, as a writer, ten years earlier he had written a story about his childhood and about how his father had rather dramatically survived some tragedy with what could have been a raft or a shelf. This was a sketchy description because his father had never told him the details of this event or of the wider context. A reader had written him a letter revealing that the name of the ship was the SS Junyo Maru, and that it had been sailing towards Sumatra with, amongst others 2300 POWs from Java aboard, when a torpedo struck it. This was in 1944 and it caused the

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

93

death of 5620 people. The survivors ended up with thousands of POWs at the Pakan Baru Death Railway, where mortality rates were also high. A is at first shocked, and does not answer the reader for a year without following up on a promise of a meeting. After the death of his sister Ada in the present of the novel, A starts to read books about Pakan Baru, and comes across the name of his father on lists of Junyo Maru survivors. He tracks down more witnesses, whom he interviews (van Dis, 1994, pp. 160–175; 1994/2004, pp. 158–172). The results are still rather sketchy and, in an imaginary conversation with his father, he tries to picture him in the transport to Sumatra on board the Junyo Maru, in the prison of Padang with other survivors and during the period in a camp. It is a narrative of years of torture and hardship (van Dis, 1994, pp. 160–175; 1994/2004, pp. 158–172). The second narrative proceeds in the opposite direction, both geographically and temporally. It starts in the Netherlands with A tracing and discovering his roots, and ends with how the routes of memories about Indonesia have formed him. Most of all, he relates the knowledge of his father’s experiences to the daily abuse to which his father subjected him during his childhood (van Dis, 1994, pp. 174, 290–291; 1994/2004, pp. 171–172, 286–287). The two narratives are told in parallel. Both reveal a search for roots and a re-rooting, which takes place through the writing of a narrative about diasporic identity. This brings me to the third step in my queering of diaspora, and how multiple routes of memories ground a diasporic identity. Not only the storyline of father and son, but also of A’s sisters and other representatives of the first generation of those who witnessed the personal, collective and cultural trauma of the violent conflicts, play an important role in the narrative by providing their stories, or by keeping silent. In contrast to the relative ease with which A finds information about political violence and his father’s experiences, it is much harder to find information about what his sisters went through. Ada’s secret diary notes suggest in a vague way that a Japanese soldier in the camp had touched her and another child, Jana’s previously mentioned friend, Els. This happened while Ada was ill. Ada remembers that they always received something extra if they sat on the laps of the Japanese. Ada does not remember how long she was ill and the quote from the diary ends with ‘I’ve forgotten the rest’ (van Dis, 1994/2004, p. 40); [De rest ben ik vergeten] (van Dis, 1994, p. 44). It makes A wonder: ‘To what extent had I myself

94

P. STOLTZ

excised memories from my consciousness? How true was the memory I had of my sister?’ (van Dis, 1994/2004, pp. 40–41); [In hoeverre had ik herinneringen uit mijn hoofd geknipt? Klopte het beeld wel dat ik van mijn zuster had?] (van Dis, 1994, pp. 42–43). This spurs him to invite Els to Ada’s funeral. Jana was his father’s favourite. She moved to Canada with her boyfriend shortly after the family’s migration to the Netherlands in the 1940s. Jana was only 18 at the time. A had always thought that the motivation for this serial migration, as for many other young repatriates from the Indies, was that the Netherlands felt cramped, but Els suggests at Ada’s funeral that Jana had fled the country (van Dis, 1994, p. 60; 1994/2004, p. 57). When A later meets Els, she suggests that Jana had been sexually abused, first by Japanese soldiers while they were interned and later by A’s father (van Dis, 1994, pp. 136–138; 1994/2004, pp. 133–135). His mother and sister Saskia do not want to address the issue and Jana herself is vague about the matter in the last conversation that A has with her, shortly before she dies in Canada (van Dis, 1994, pp. 292–298; 1994/2004, pp. 288–294). A does not search for more information about sexual violence in the same way that he searches for information about political violence, by reading books on the topic or writing stories that provoke reactions from readers. He attempts to condemn acts of sexual violence, but he has only limited information about the facts and can only speculate about what the silences of his sisters and mother mean. This returns us to the connections between silence, voice and agency. Migration researcher Wim Willems’ interpretation of the novel Indische duinen is that A’s conflictual relationships with his sisters are overshadowed by his concerns about the memories of his abusive father (Willems, 2003, p. 203). In contrast, I rather find the silences, voices and agencies of the mother and sisters, as well as characters such as the friend Els, to be illustrative of the way in which van Dis provides alternatives to a linear form of storytelling.

4.5

Resistance and the Politics of Privilege

Intersectional approaches to negotiations of diasporic identity and queer approaches to diaspora are useful tools, which can complement each other when we study everyday resistance to silences about violent conflicts. An intersectional approach is useful if we want to understand the emergence

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

95

of silence in personal and social narratives of memories of violent conflicts. It emphasizes the structural conditions of racism and the intersectionality of categories of race with other categories such as nation, generation and gender that also circumscribe speech. An intersectional approach also directs the spotlight onto the effects of intersectional inequalities upon the formation and, most importantly in the context of this chapter, the renegotiation of hybrid and diasporic identities. Notions of privilege and marginalization are important in intersectional approaches, but what and how identities are privileged or marginalized can change across time and place. This raises questions about the opportunities that different postcolonial migrants have to change and renegotiate complex and hybrid diasporic identities, especially when categories such as whiteness are left silent, unmarked and unproblematic in contemporary Dutch society. Here, combination with the queering of diaspora becomes interesting, because it provides an opportunity to engage with the multiplicity of roots of identities and routes of memories that ground individual and collective identities. Neither places of origin nor places of arrival remain unchanged during the process of complex engagements with here and there, now and then. So, we might wonder, following Alexander, what is diaspora for when A engages with roots and routes (see Alexander, 2017)? Are the silences of Jana and A’s mother agentic, and if so, when and how? How does A’s everyday resistance to silences in personal and collective narratives influence his opportunities to renegotiate his identity? Consequently, it is important to bring several narratives into conversation with one another and to consider the link between silences, voices and agencies about the past (see Hansen, 2019; Hirsch, 2012). This brings me to my third question: what do ‘we’ think of past, present and future? Does A pass moral judgement upon events and contexts in the past and/or relate this to strategies to obtain justice and equality in the present and/or the future? After learning about his relatives’ experiences and from initially being angry and morally outraged about the ways in which his parents treated him (van Dis, 1994, pp. 262–263, 265–266, 291–295, and 300–304), A eventually finds some form of reconciliation. He bases this partly on more knowledge about his father’s violent past, and partly on his lack of knowledge about the violent past of his sisters and others, such as Els. In his final conversation with Jana, shortly before her death, his sister remains evasive about the past, even in response to direct questions. Still, A concludes:

96

P. STOLTZ

Right she was: no more skeletons in the cupboard, no more interrogations, no more reproaches, either. I went over to the window and stood there with my hands in my pockets… ‘Thank you for all those stories you read me in the old days,’ I said. (van Dis, 1994/2004, p. 294) [En zo was het, geen oude lijken uit de kast, geen kruisverhoor en treiterijen meer. Ik stond op en ging met mijn handen in mijn broekzakken voor het raam staan… ‘Bedankt voor alle verhalen die je me vroeger voorlas’, zei ik.] (van Dis, 1994, p. 298)

A had discovered more about his father’s violent past. In an imaginary walk and talk along the beach, he fantasizes at the end of the novel: I climbed up to the crest of the dune with my father leaning on me. The burden, heavy at first, grew lighter. The wounded soldier was an angel hovering about my shoulders. (van Dis, 1994/2004, p. 300) [Ik liep het duin op. Mijn vader steunde op me, en de last werd lichter. De gewonde was een engel die boven mijn rug zweefde.] (van Dis, 1994, p. 304)

Interestingly, the novel ends the way it started in the prologue: from the perspective of A’s mother. In the epilogue, while she is flying home from Canada after Jana’s funeral, she looks at an old photo of herself with Just II and the four children among the dunes. It leads her to reflect upon the different reactions of her husbands, daughters and son to memories of the violent past. She thinks that A exaggerates the past and wonders whether he will let go soon. She thoughtlessly tears the photo apart, before noticing a brilliant line of morning sun over the waves and the coast of the Netherlands, shortly before landing (van Dis 1994, pp. 307– 314; 1994/2004, pp. 301–308). The moral judgement that A passes on the events and contexts of the past are related to his identity as belonging to a second generation as opposed to a first generation. Marianne Hirsch has introduced the notion of postmemory or ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before’. The connection of postmemory to the past is mediated, according to Hirsch, by imaginative investment, projection and creation (Hirsch, 2012, pp. 5, 15–18; Hirsch & Miller, 2011). We can also recognize this in the novel. Silences about unspeakable events that preceded A’s birth have shaped his identity. These silences have influenced his relationships with those around him from the first

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

97

generation, such as his mother and sisters, but they have also displaced the experiences of violence that A suffered at the hands of his father. A struggles with feelings of anger and indignation throughout the narrative and looks for closure. In the end, he finds this with both his sisters and his mother as well as, in a sense, his father. Importantly, Hirsch and Smith point out that the use of memory in the service of identity politics has its pitfalls. This concerns, for example, the affirming of a shared past of victimization between first and second generations, rather than the envisioning of a different future. Feminist modes of knowing and listening that facilitate the work of memory and transmission require, they argue, a sensitivity to the differences that separate the primary from the secondary witnesses. This includes a sensitivity to definitions of active and activist listening, empathic identification and the type of solidarity that is required to imagine the experiences of the other, and therefore of the past (Hirsch & Smith, 2002, p. 12). van Dis attempts to display such a sensitivity in the examples given above. A, as a second-generation postcolonial migrant, searches for knowledge about the past of his first-generation father and considers how his father’s experiences have displaced his own stories and experiences. This made him hate himself as a child (van Dis, 1994, p. 266), whereas in the present he has a more empathic identification with his father in relation to himself (as it says above: ‘the burden … grew lighter’). In addition, A attempts to listen to his (silent) sister Jana in the quote above and van Dis attempts to imagine the voice of the (otherwise silent) mother in the preface and epilogue. Their silences also indicate that there are limits to how much A (and van Dis) can understand. As readers, we can also only speculate together with van Dis about the reasons for these silences. Although van Dis attempts to be sensitive to and stand in solidarity with the struggles over the transnational memories of the first generation, the character of A is also struggling with his situatedness and position in relation to the white innocence of collective Dutch identity: he is a ‘totok’. This means that, throughout the novel, he struggles in emotional and often angry and ironic ways with ambiguous situations in which he simultaneously holds privileges as a white, male, well-known Dutch writer, while also being marginalized in relation to the experiences of firstgeneration postcolonial migrants, who are often brown, Indisch and/or women. Feminist researcher Sonia Kruks, in her study on privilege, identifies a so-called politics of self-transformation, in which a person endeavours to discover how he or she has ignorantly accepted their privilege and then

98

P. STOLTZ

proceeds to work on oneself in order to overcome it (Kruks, 2012, p. 95; see also Srivastava, 2006). Relatedly, Kruks identifies a politics of deployment , in which a person contests their privilege by purposefully using the advantages that stem from it in order to combat structures of privilege. These political repertoires are not necessarily mutually exclusive (Kruks, 2012, p. 95). They reveal the limitations of self-interrogation and the importance of focusing on strategies to obtain justice and equality, on how to get rid of racism and of being aware of the blind spots of white people (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007). It might seem as though the end of the novel indicates that A has found reconciliation with the past and moved on. In the meantime, van Dis has received general acclaim for Indische duinen and has visited Indonesia and Japan (van Dis, 2002). His increased knowledge about the events and contexts of the violence of WWII and the memories of these in Indonesia and the Netherlands have gained him an anti-racist activist voice in the Netherlands. He often uses this voice to address injustices and inequalities in relation to memories of the past in Indonesia. In 2014, twenty years after the publication of ID, van Dis wrote a sequel. This novel, Ik kom terug (transl.: I am coming back) also concerns memories of the same wars, but here they are discussed in conversations with his white, Dutch mother, who, shortly before her death, decided to break her silence and tell her son about her life. In this case, too, there are limits to what van Dis can grasp (van Dis, 2014).

4.6

Everyday Forms of Resistance

I suggest that, by focusing on everyday forms of resistance to silence and denial, it becomes possible to ask questions about everyday strategies for dealing with the effects of the structural conditions that depoliticize the memories of the violent conflicts that took place in Indonesia. These enable us to consider continuity and change in relation to renegotiations of identity and issues of equality and social justice (see Åhäll, 2019; Björkdahl, Hall, & Svensson, 2019; Solomon & Steele, 2017). A combination of the tools of intersectionality and those of queer diaspora are useful in the analysis of gendered and everyday resistance in the form of silence, of resistances to silence, and of the ways in which silence, voice and agency are related. The everyday has the function of unveiling marginalized voices, such as letting women’s voices about sexual violence emerge (see Campbell, Demir, & O’Reilly, 2019). The focus here on

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

99

everyday resistance also addresses how the structural level of ‘white innocence’ creates silences that reinforce white privilege at both micro and macro levels. This privilege makes it difficult to raise issues about inequalities according to categories not only of ‘race’, but also of gender and generation, or to address historical as well as contemporary injustices concerning the everyday lives of victims, perpetrators and bystanders of both the first and subsequent generations. The consequences of using simplistic understandings of people as either victims or perpetrators are felt in the formation of diasporic identities. In the next chapter, I will therefore address the notion of hegemonic masculinity from transnational and postcolonial perspectives when analysing the identity formations of first- and second-generation postcolonial migrants.

References Acheson, K. (2008). Silence as gesture: Rethinking the nature of communicative silences. Communication Theory, 18, 535–555. Åhäll, L. (2019). Feeling everyday IR: Embodied, affective, militarising movement as choreography of war. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 149–166. Alexander, C. (2017). Beyond ‘The “diaspora” diaspora’: A response to Rogers Brubaker. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(9), 1544–1555. Bamberg, M. (2011). Who am I? Narration and its contribution to self and identity. Theory & Psychology, 21(1), 3–24. Björkdahl, A., Hall, M., & Svensson, T. (2019). Everyday international relations: Editors’ introduction. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 123–130. Bosma, U., & Raben, R. (1996). Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies: A history of creolisation and empire, 1500–1920. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press. Brubaker, R. (2005). The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28(1), 1–19. Brubaker, R. (2016). Trans: Gender and race in an age of unsettled identities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brubaker, R. (2017). Thinking with trans: Reply to my critics. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(8), 1330–1336. Campbell, K., Demir, E., & O’Reilly, M. (2019). Understanding conflict-related sexual violence and the ‘everyday’ experience of conflict through witness testimonies. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 254–277. de Vries, M. (2009). ‘Indisch is een gevoel’. De tweede en derde generatie Indische Nederlanders [Indisch is a feeling. The second and third generation of Indische Nederlanders]. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

100

P. STOLTZ

Frankenberg, R. (1993). The social construction of whiteness: White women, race matters. London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2011). Stories, big and small: Toward a synthesis. Theory & Psychology, 21(1), 114–121. Gilroy, P. (1987). There ain’t no black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The black atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hayes, J. (2011). Queering roots, queering diaspora. In M. Hirsch & N. K. Miller (Eds.), Rites of return: Diaspora poetics and the politics of memory (pp. 72–87). New York: Columbia University Press. Hayes, J. (2016). Queer roots for the diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hansen, L. (2019). Reconstructing the silence/speech dichotomy in feminist security studies: Gender, agency and the politics of subjectivity in La Frontière Invisible. In J. Parpart & S. Parashar (Eds.), Rethinking silence, voice and agency in contested gendered terrains (pp. 27–49). London: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41(1), 1–20. Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, M., & Miller, N. K. (Eds.). (2011). Rites of return: Diaspora poetics and the politics of memory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, M., & Smith, V. (2002). Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction. Signs, 28(1), 1–19. Jaffe, R. (2018). Reflections: A conversation with Gloria Wekker. Development and Change, 49(2), 547–560. Kruks, S. (2005). Simone de Beauvoir and the politics of privilege. Hypatia, 20(1), 178–205. Kruks, S. (2012). Simone de Beauvoir and the politics of ambiguity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mannheim, K. (1927/1952). The problem of generations. In P. Kecskemeti (Ed.), Karl Mannheim: Essays on the sociology of knowledge, collected works (Vol. 5, pp. 276–322). New York, NY: Routledge. Parpart, J., & Parashar, S. (Eds.). (2019). Rethinking silence, voice and agency in contested gendered terrains. London: Routledge. Pattynama, P. (2012). Cultural memory and Indo-Dutch identity formations. In U. Bosma (Ed.), Post-colonial immigrants and identity formations in the Netherlands (pp. 175–192). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Pattynama, P. (2014). Bitterzoet Indië. Herinnering en nostalgie in literatuur, fotos en films [Bittersweet Dutch East Indies. Memory and nostalgia in literature, photos and films]. Amsterdam: Prometheus.

4

SILENCE, VIOLENCE AND GENDERED RESISTANCE

101

Phoenix, A. (2017). Unsettling intersectional identities: Historicizing embodied boundaries and border crossings. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(8), 1312–1319. Solomon, T., & Steele, B. (2017). Micro-moves in international relations theory. European Journal of International Relations, 23(2), 267–291. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Srivastava, S. (2006). Tears, fears and careers: Anti-racism and emotion in social movement organizations. The Canadian Journal of Sociology, 31(1), 55–90. Stoler, A. L. (2008). Epistemic politics: Ontologies of colonial common sense. The Philosophical Forum, 39(3), 349–361. Suleiman, S. R. (2002). The 1.5 generation: Thinking about child survivors and the Holocaust. American Imago, 59(3), 277–295. Sullivan, S., & Tuana, N. (2007). Introduction. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 1–10). Albany: State University of New York Press. Sylvester, C. (2019). Voice, silence, agency, confusion. In J. Parpart & S. Parashar (Eds.), Rethinking silence, voice and agency in contested gendered terrains (pp. 16–26). London: Routledge. Weigel, S. (2002). ‘Generation’ as a symbolic form: On the genealogical discourse of memory since 1945. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 77 (4), 264–277. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Willems, W. (2003). ‘Altijd hongerig naar het Hogere en een hapje’. Over het Indische werk van Adriaan van Dis [‘Always eager for the higher and a snack’. About the Indisch work of Adriaan van Dis]. Indische Letteren, 18(1), 197–206. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage.

Novels van Dis, A. (1994). Indische duinen [Indisch dunes]. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. van Dis, A. (1994/2004). My father’s war (Dutch original, Indische duinen, 1994) (I. Rilke, Trans.). London: William Heinemann. van Dis, A. (2002). Op oorlogspad in Japan [On the warpath in Japan]. In A. van Dis (Ed.), De Indische boeken (pp. 351–442). Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. van Dis, A. (2014). Ik kom terug [I will return]. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Augustus.

CHAPTER 5

Masculinities, Intersectionality and Transnational Memories

Are not his memories really an out-of-proportion defence of all the wretched things he has been up to? Or a way of having an endless discussion in order to receive more medals on top of the one he already had? As far as I can remember, [Arto] stopped at one hundred when he carved his victims on the butt of his rifle. Even if this is only ten percent of everything he recounts, he and his Dutch mates remain mass murderers… Granted, it is a cliché: nobody listened to them…Unfortunately, they are crazy about the cliché of the ‘silent Indisch father’ over here. (Birney, 2016, p. 488, transl. PS) [Zijn zijn memoires niet eigenlijk een uit de hand gelopen verweerschrift voor al dat ellendigs wat hij daarginds heeft uitgevreten? Of een lang gesoebat om nog meer lintjes dan dat ene dat hem is toegekomen? ( Arto) stopte zelf bij honderd met het kerven van zijn slachtoffers op zijn geweerkolf, als ik me goed herinner. Zelfs al is het maar tien procent van wat hij allemaal opsomt, hij blijft een massamoordenaar met die Hollandse maten van hem…. Toegegeven, het is een cliché: er is niet naar hen geluisterd… Helaas zijn ze hier dol op het cliché van de ‘zwijgende Indische vader’.] (Birney, 2016, p. 488)

Memories of mass violence and human rights abuses can travel with postcolonial migrants from one part of the world to another, but there is no guarantee that individuals or societies will receive these memories in particular ways (Assmann, 2014; Erll, 2011; Radstone, 2011). Silence and

© The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_5

103

104

P. STOLTZ

denial can result in the observation that, whereas some narratives of memories may successfully provoke conventional reactions to facts about atrocities amongst politicians, lawyers and societies, for example by recognizing the suffering of victims and the perpetration of criminal offences, others may not (see Chapters 3 and 4; Cohen, 2001). In the Netherlands, even decades after Indonesian independence, it is still rare to find public references to war crimes committed by the Dutch armed forces during the war of independence, even though considerable evidence existed indicating that violations of the laws of war had occurred. Only very recently have historians proven the use of structuralized mass violence by the Dutch armed forces (Limpach, 2016; Oostindie, 2015), and legal repercussions have been rare (Scagliola, 2012; Van den Herik, 2012). The transnational dynamics of memories of violence are an important focus if we want to understand the constraints faced by gendered resistances to denials of responsibility. In this chapter, I argue that it is fruitful to combine postcolonial and intersectional perspectives (Hill Collins, 2015; Krishna, 2009; Spivak, 1988) with the concept of hegemonic masculinities (Beasley, 2014; Connell, 1983; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) and with a methodological intervention into narratives of transnational memories (De Cesari & Rigney, 2014). This is useful if we want to study the constraints faced by gendered resistances to denials and take the politics of location seriously. In the following, I show how such transnational dynamics influence the opportunities for male postcolonial migrants from different generations to resist hegemonic projects of masculinity, Eurocentrism and racism as well as silences about possible historical injustices. I illustrate my argument with examples from the Dutch autobiographical and multimodal novel The Interpreter from Java [Dutch original: De tolk van Java] by Alfred Birney (2016). All translations of excerpts from the novel are my own, and below I use The Interpreter to indicate this novel.

5.1 Hegemonic Masculinity, Intersectionality and Transnational Memories In this chapter, I will use the concept of hegemonic masculinities to consider the idea of multiple masculinities, the concept of hegemony, and the opportunities for resistance and social change (see Beasley, 2014; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Hamber, 2016). If we want to identify how gendered power relations operate at both individual and collective levels, then

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

105

we can use the notion of hegemonic masculinity. This can provide us with a framework for understanding how gendered inequalities are produced and reproduced over time. We can trace the beginnings of the notion of hegemonic masculinity back to the 1980s, when sociologists such as Connell (1983) proposed a model of multiple masculinities and power relations. Connell questioned universalizing claims about the category of men and demonstrated how social processes create idealized definitions of masculinity. These models of masculinity can circulate in narrations within organizations (such as, in the case of this study, the colonial armed forces) or they may be celebrated by the state. Thus, they refer to, but also distort, the everyday realities of social practice and provide models of relations with women and solutions to problems with gender relations (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). This makes hegemonic masculinity relevant to my argument in that it can help to identify tensions between individual identities on the one hand and collective national identities on the other. It can also help us to identify the influence that these tensions can have on the identity formations, voices and agencies of first- and second-generation male postcolonial migrants. Not all masculinities lead to a status as hegemonic. Marginalized masculinities can be discriminated against and/or trivialized due to intersectional inequalities such as class, race, ethnicity and nationality (Connell, 1995; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005; Messerschmidt, 2015, 2019). This implies that a multilevel approach to intersectionality can help us to take issue with structures at the macro level as well as identities and practices at the micro level (Christensen & Qvotrup Jensen, 2014). It can help us to focus on the dynamics of power relations, rather than the fixation of categories of bodies and power relations. Postcolonial and Black feminists have highlighted the usefulness of an intersectional approach in the study of inequalities, since intersectional inequalities influence the agency and senses of belonging of individuals (see Hill Collins, 2015; Yuval-Davis, 2011). As we could already see in the last chapter, these inequalities may influence who can and who cannot have a voice in struggles over collective memories of colonialism and war. Following Hill Collins (2015), in this chapter I stress two broad aspects of an intersectional approach: (1) I use intersectionality as an analytical approach to analyse social inequalities. It is important to emphasize contexts of time, place and space in the analyses of power relations during times of conflict and post-conflict transformations (see research questions

106

P. STOLTZ

1 and 2). (2) I use intersectionality as critical praxis to emphasize agency and reactions to social inequalities in the pursuit of social justice. Political questions have always shaped the field of intersectionality. Notions of identity and agency have been central concerns. This means, following Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013) and Hill Collins (2015), that, just as practice should inform theory, so theory should inform best practice (see research question 3). Recently, Connell and other masculinity scholars have suggested that the relationship between hegemony and masculinity needs rethinking in the light of postcolonial critique and transnational space (Beasley, 2014; Connell, 2014, 2016; Hearn, 2015; Hearn, Blagojevi´c, & Harrison, 2014; Messerschmidt, 2015). Postcolonial perspectives are useful because they enable us to analyse the influences of transnational and global processes of colonialism and postcolonial migration. Postcolonial research relates questions of power and domination to hegemony and resistance (see Chakrabarty, 2008; Guha, 1998; Krishna, 2009; Spivak, 1988; YuvalDavis, 2011). Colonial projects have both disrupted gender orders and launched new hegemonic projects. We can trace configurations of masculinity in the contemporary complex of institutions and cultural patterns and practices that enabled metropolitan societies (such as the Netherlands) to sustain empire. The historical continuity of this complex underlies the coloniality of power and its persistence in today’s world (Connell, 2016). It is thus important to investigate the nexus between local and global power relations. By focusing on male postcolonial migrants and transnational memories, I will develop the point that a gender order emerges in transnational space and that we can define minimal conditions for hegemony within it. Importantly, counter-hegemonic projects among men can have limited reach and the key concept in the study of masculinities from a global perspective is, according to Connell, hegemony under construction, rather than achieved hegemony (Connell, 2016, p. 303; Hearn et al., 2014). Postcolonial migrants can be carriers of transnational memories. The intersection of gender and mobility is not a new field, but it has been preoccupied with studies of migrant women and femininities, and has neglected a focus on men, masculinities and migration. Concurrently, migration as a process influences changes in defining, negotiating and performing masculinities (Wojnicka & Pustułka, 2019). Since the publication of the edited volume Migrant Men in 2009, much research on this theme has emerged, often using critical postcolonial and intersectional

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

107

approaches (Donaldson, Hibbins, Howson, & Pease, 2009). What is still missing, however, is research on the relations between first- and secondgeneration migrant men (Wojnicka & Pustułka, 2019). This is the focus here. The relationship between first- and second-generation postcolonial migrant men is interesting in the context of thinking about hegemonic masculinity because situating masculinities within transnational politics is no simple matter. This means that usage of the term hegemonic masculinities may require further analysis. Beasley argues that assumptions about hegemonic masculinity give rise to overly economistic interpretations of globalization. She calls for a de-massification of the term hegemonic masculinity in order to avoid insufficiently nuanced and overly uniform topdown analyses of gendered globalization. Following Beasley, I suggest a more focused characterization of hegemonic masculinity as being concerned with a political ideal or model, and as an enabling mode of representation that mobilizes institutions and practices (Beasley, 2008, 2014). I use thinking from the emerging field of transnational memories to support my argument and situate the masculinities in this chapter within postcolonial memory politics (see Chapter 2; Stoltz, 2016). This move emphasizes the postcolonial critique of globalization by taking seriously the politics of location (Krishna, 2009). Memory scholar Astrid Erll argues that we can best understand the ‘travel’ of memories as the continuous wandering of carriers of memory (such as first-generation postcolonial migrants), media, content, forms and practices of memory, their ongoing transformations through time and space and across social, linguistic and political borders (Erll, 2011, pp. 11–12). Past atrocities are nevertheless spatially grounded. Memories about them might travel, but individuals or societies receive these memories locally. Some individual and institutional actors manage to form these narratives into a successful representation, while others are unsuccessful (Sierp & Wüstenberg, 2015). This directs the focus towards how memories that depend upon concrete places and times (such as the memories of veterans and firstgeneration postcolonial migrants) are shaped by global processes (for example, of colonialism or decolonization) and how the personal and local mould the global (Sierp & Wüstenberg, 2015; see also Radstone, 2011; Rothberg, 2014b).

108

P. STOLTZ

A useful distinction is between transnational memories, defined as those memories which are shared across borders, and transcultural memories, which more specifically denote a kind of hybridization of memories that cross cultural borders and enable the imagining of new communities and new types of belonging. Whereas transnational remembering may carry the potential for transcultural memory, it does not necessitate it. The notion of the transnational concerns the relationship between multiple localities of memory, such as when the veteran/father in The Interpreter carries his memories of violence between Indonesia and the Netherlands. Transcultural memory is about the blending of memories, such as when narratives of memories of violence enable the imagining of new types of belonging to both national and masculine identities (see Rothberg, 2014a; Törnquist-Plewa, 2018, p. 302; Wüstenberg, 2019). The movement of memories is based on power structures and is mediated through different actors and institutions, such as states. Memory scholars often use the notion of scale in order to grasp this power dynamic between actors that creates borders and hierarchies and the mechanisms of the reification of such hierarchies. Scale is also useful for grasping the levels at which practices of remembrance happen (Wüstenberg, 2019). Memory scholar Michael Rothberg points out that transnational memory refers to the scales of remembrance that intersect in the crossing of geopolitical borders (Rothberg, 2014a, p. 130). The focus on power means that scales are actively and relationally produced through struggle, rather than this being a spatiality that can be ‘found’ in a political landscape (Nicholls, Miller, & Beaumont, 2013). Memory practices that straddle borders are not merely free-flowing movements. Rather, these memory practices are often characterized by a distinct directionality of agency. Power is unevenly distributed across scales and transnational remembering is often governed not by a mechanism of equal exchange but through the brokerage of powerful actors, by imposition from above, or challenges from below. It also means that agency at different levels constructs memory in ways that are necessarily both local and transnational in character (Wüstenberg, 2019). In the following analysis of The Interpreter from Java [De tolk van Java] by Alfred Birney (2016), I will illustrate how the locality of transnational memories influences the agency of the characters of a father and son over time. This includes their opportunities to resist hegemonic projects of Eurocentrism and racism, as well as silences and denials about historical

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

109

injustices. My reading aims to analyse various components of the identities of the ‘mixed-race’ father (a veteran who has worked as an interpreter for the Dutch colonial armed forces in Indonesia during the 1940s) and his son. The relationship between father and son is interesting in that it includes the roles of both victims and perpetrators as well as bystanders in unclear ways and highlights tensions between individual and collective (national) identities. Hegemonic masculinities, intersectionality and transnationalism all complicate the father/son relationship, but I argue that, by combining these approaches, we gain more insight into how the relationship moves across time, place and space and what influences their respective agency. Again, my three research questions will guide the analysis.

5.2

The Interpreter from Java

The Interpreter from Java was published in 2016, approximately 70 years after Indonesian independence. The descriptions of events and experiences in the Dutch East Indies in this novel are written in Dutch and, just as in Indische duinen in the previous chapter, interactions between rulers and ruled are often described in racial and political terms. Dutch colonial literature is mainly read and discussed by Dutch readers. This literature is presented from the rulers’ point of view and, consequently, it does not attract much interest among Indonesian readers, either in the original or in translation. There is a long tradition of fiction about the colonial period in Indonesia in Dutch, dating back to the nineteenth century (Couperus, 1900; du Perron, 1935; Multatuli, 1860). In addition, there is a tradition of writing about postcolonial migration to the Netherlands after Indonesian independence (see, e.g., Bloem, 1983; Dermoût, 1955; Gomes, 1975; Haasse, 1948, 1992; Springer, 1993; van Dis, 1994, 2014). The theme of violence, let alone mass violence and human rights abuses, mostly remains in the background of these narratives. This makes The Interpreter a notable exception (Stoltz, 2019). The Interpreter is a candid autobiographical novel about memories of colonialism, racism and mass violence. While the father in Indische duinen was mainly silent and had died early in the life of his son, the father is alive and most definitely kicking in The Interpreter. By the end of the novel, the son is in his early sixties. Despite his age, he still does not have any answers to questions about his father’s behaviour, or, as he puts it: ‘Had he turned crazy during the war or was he simply crazy since birth?’ [Was

110

P. STOLTZ

hij nou gek geworden in de oorlog of eenvoudig gek geboren?] (Birney, 2016, p. 531). Birney’s father—Adolf, but in the novel called Arto—was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, as the unacknowledged son of a father who had roots in Eastern Java, the Netherlands and Scotland, and a Chinese mother. During the occupation, the Japanese tortured him due to his activities as a member of a Dutch sabotage team (Birney, 2016, p. 13). The life of Arto is marked in many ways by the socio-political contexts of the violent conflicts of 1940s Indonesia. In 1945, Indonesian nationalists declared the country independent from the colonial power of the Netherlands after the surrender of the Japanese (see Chapter 3; also Cribb, 2010, Chapter 5). The successive Dutch governments that emerged during the second half of the 1940s and after the German loss of WWII in 1945 did not initially approve of the new Indonesian republic and attempted to re-establish control over what they considered to be domestic order. Indonesia also had a rapid turnover of governments during these years. Under international pressure from the British and the UN, the Indonesian and Dutch sides met to attempt to avoid escalation of the conflict. This resulted in the controversial Linggajati Agreement (1946) and the Renville Agreement (1948). Disputes about the interpretation and execution of these agreements between the new republic and the Netherlands led to two Dutch military interventions in Indonesia, the first in 1947 and the second from December 1948 until January 1949. The Dutch called these ‘politionele acties ’ or ‘police actions’, whereas the Indonesian military and civilians called them ‘agressi militer Belanda’ or ‘Dutch military aggression’ (see Cribb, 2010, Chapter 5; Van den Herik, 2012; also Freriks, 2015, pp. 106–108 on the terminology). When appropriate, I will follow the latter interpretation. During this period, Arto’s pro-Dutch and, more narrowly, his proDutch-royalty attitudes led him to voluntarily join the colonial navy as an interpreter. Subsequently, the navy ordered him to do more than just interpreting and he participated in both mass violence and torture during the Dutch military aggressions. Consequently, Arto ended up on an Indonesian nationalist blacklist of traitors and had to flee to the Netherlands. Here, he married and had children. The author (in the novel calling himself Alan Noland, thereby alluding to the English concept of ‘no land’) was the eldest son. Perhaps due to post-traumatic stress disorder, Arto was regularly violent towards both his wife and children. The situation ended in divorce and both parents lost custody over their children

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

111

when Alan was 13. Afterwards, the state took Alan and his siblings into youth care for the remainder of their childhood. Siblings and parents had a strained relationship until the present time of the novel, which is set in the early 2010s. By that time, Arto had passed away. Similarly to Indische duinen, the narrative of The Interpreter is also a search for roots and routes, but much of the focus in this case is directed towards memories of violence. We can recognize this in the subtitle: Autobiographical sledgehammer blow which pulverizes the clichés about the Dutch East Indies [Autobiografische mokerslag die de clichés over NederlandsIndië verpulvert ]. The ‘sledgehammer blow’ is directed against the cliché relating to the persistent silence and denials about events of structuralized mass violence and the occurrence of human rights abuses by the Dutch colonial armed forces. This silence and the general silence about colonialism in Indonesia and the war are, according to Birney, unfairly blamed on ‘the silent Indisch father’, who is … a myth or un-useful literary motif, that can be referred back to a cliché based on the western romantic ideal of the silent, or smiling or modest or wise, Oriental. But boys go to war and come back from war, apart from those who fell. One comes back silent, another talkative. My father told, talked, yelled and wrote about the war. Stokkermans on the other hand, a white man from the Westland, remained silent. […een mythe, of een literair motief dat niet deugt, een cliché dat terugvoert op het westerse romantische ideal van de zwijgende, dan wel glimlachende dan wel bescheiden dan wel wijze oosterling. Maar jongens gaan de oorlog in en komen de oorlog weer uit, gesneuvelden daargelaten. De een komt er zwijgend uit, de ander verhalend. Mijn vader vertelde, verhaalde, schreeuwde en schreef over de oorlog. Maar Stokkermans, een blanke man uit het Westland, zweeg.] (Birney, 2016, p. 182)

Hancock has pointed out that contending with externally imposed narratives and internal grappling with how to navigate such images is central to the ways in which social constructions of women of colour become integrated into the visibility project of intersectionality-like thought (Hancock, 2016, p. 10). In the context of my argument about masculinities, let me exemplify this with Birney’s comments on ‘the silent Indisch father’. We can recognize an externally imposed collective narrative about a racialized group in ‘the western romantic ideal of the silent, or smiling or modest or wise, Oriental’. Birney counters this ideal by pointing out

112

P. STOLTZ

that boys are not all the same, some are silent and some talkative, and that white Dutch marines can also be silent. Differently put, the father grapples at an individual, micro level of analysis with how to navigate this controlling image, which is part of an ideology of domination, by telling, talking, yelling and writing. His struggle is reminiscent of Connell’s observation that counter-hegemonic projects among men can have limited reach (Connell, 2016). It also encourages me to conduct an analysis of the way in which a transnational perspective allows memory to be visualized as ‘a dynamic operating at multiple, interlocking scales and involving conduits, intersections, circuits, and articulations’ (De Cesari & Rigney, 2014, p. 6). Birney wrote The Interpreter in a rather unusual format. He combines brief memories of discussions with his mother (born in the Netherlands and a survivor of the German occupation) with long extracts from a diary written by his father during the 1940s. There are also a few webcam chats with his twin brother and his own extensive reflections upon his memories of his own life, and what he can grasp of his father’s behaviour and memories. Due to lack of space, I will only elaborate upon his relationships with his mother and brother in passing. Nonetheless, the multimodal character of the novel shows that Birney is aware of the importance of both interpersonal and collective narratives to his discussion of the impact of transnational memories of violence upon the identity formations of his father and himself (Stoltz, 2019).

5.3 An Unclear Path to a Dominant Masculine Place Racialized and colonized/colonizer masculinities have a militarized history, but these masculinities do not automatically bestow status or standing as hegemonic (see Beasley, 2014; Connell, 2016; Guha, 1998; Spivak, 1988). This emphasizes the importance and relevance of conducting an intersectional analysis. There is no clear path to a dominant masculine position for people embedded in a colonial narrative that features other intersections of race and power. I will use an intersectional analysis of The Interpreter to illustrate the dynamics by which colonial projects have both disrupted gender orders and launched new hegemonic projects (Stoltz, 2019).

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

113

The Dutch naming of gendered and racial formations is politically and socially sensitive. We saw this in the last chapter by means of the discussion about notions of whiteness and being a second-generation Indisch or totok. For Birney, the challenges of showing the political and social sensibilities of naming are so central to the narrative about his relationship with his father and with others in Dutch and Indonesian societies, that he includes descriptions of his interpretations of this naming in a glossary at the end of the novel. Here, he distinguishes between the colonial terminology of indo, Indo-Europeaan and Indo-Peranakan and the postcolonial terminology of Indisch and Indo (Birney, 2016, p. 537). This means that, in the novel, in the colonial context the abusive and insulting word indo (with a lower-case i) indicates a person who was born of a European—usually Dutch—father and an Indonesian mother and who had the lineage but not the rights of an Indo-Europeaan. An Indo-Europeaan, in turn, was a mixed-race person whose Dutch father had legally recognized him or her and who had a Dutch passport. Here, Indo (with a capital I ) is the abbreviation of Indo-Europeaan, or the nom de guerre of the post-war generation, who wanted to distinguish themselves from the pre-war first generation of postcolonial migrants, who called themselves Indische Nederlanders . Birney depicts the postcolonial terminology of Indisch or Indische Nederlanders as a cultural signification of both whites and Indos who have features and habits acquired in the Dutch East Indies. Indo-Peranakan indicates a child born of an Indo father and a Peranakan mother and a Peranakan was a child who was born in the Dutch East Indies to Chinese parents. Racialized groups are organized by racial formations, which are historically constructed and constantly changing. These formations also organize the specific patterns of racial inequalities that link racialized populations and the social problems that can be the consequence of these inequalities (Hill Collins, 2015, p. 4). The intersection of racialized groups with gendered groups and gendered formations is important here, and the glossary shows how racialized and gendered formations of groups intersect in the naming of how these groups are constructed as belonging to the Dutch (and Indonesian) nations and to Europe as opposed to Asia. This naming is enacted by the colonial, and subsequently by the post-colonial, Dutch state; for example, by means of a passport. It is also enacted by how individuals choose to name themselves in order to be recognized as, for example, Indo (Stoltz, 2019).

114

P. STOLTZ

Struggles over naming show which identity formations are allowed status or standing as hegemonic at different moments in time and space. We can use the identity formations of the characters of Alan and his father Arto to illustrate this. As the child of a Dutch mother and an IndoPeranakan father and a second-generation postcolonial migrant, Alan, who lives in the Netherlands, has a clear identity as both Dutch and Indo, but not as Indonesian. Neither does he identify as his father’s preferred and more colonial notion of Indische Nederlander. Alan describes this as ‘…a term that my father liked to stick to and which I could hardly even mention without getting upset’ […een term waar mijn vader graag aan vasthield en die ik nauwelijks uit mijn strot krijg ] (Birney, 2016, p. 52; see above on Indische Nederlander). Alan challenges Arto, because he is trying to find an attitude towards his father’s (memories of) violence and lack of roots in order to position himself within Dutch society (Birney, 2016, Parts I, III and V). At the same time, Alan has to face racism in Dutch society, for example, as a child at the boarding school where he is placed by the state, or later at a boarding house (Birney, 2016, pp. 266–269). The relationship with his white mother is also constrained, and he accuses her of being a Belanda (a Dutch person—similar to totok in the previous chapter) who is embarrassed about the children she had with an Indo-Peranakan man (Birney, 2016, pp. 84–85). For Alan, the intersection of gender, ‘race’, nationality and generation differs from that of his father. The contemporary Dutch social narratives of decolonization, violence and war play a different role in his sense of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011) and self-positioning than it does for Arto. Father Arto and son Alan are both Indo-Peranakan. Neither of them feels at home in Dutch society, but Arto is primarily a proud Indische Nederlander who was supportive of the colonial state, but critical of racism in the armed forces, in Indonesia in general and later in the Netherlands. His son Alan positions himself in a different way, as an Indo who is critical of both colonialism and racism (Stoltz, 2019). Institutions such as the military can also influence conflicts between individual identity formations and the national identities of postcolonial migrants (see Woodward & Duncanson, 2017). Consequently, the importance of using an intersectional analysis and taking the silences of military masculinities seriously has been increasingly recognized in interventions within feminist international relations, masculinity studies and critical military studies, as well as in the study of masculinity and transitional justice.

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

115

These researchers have emphasized the importance of paying attention to the margins and the marginal, variously characterized, of masculinities and war (Cahn & Ní Aoláin, 2010; Chisholm & Tidy, 2017; Hamber 2016; Woodward & Duncanson, 2017). Arto’s position in the navy is interesting because hegemonic masculinity narratives of the Dutch colonial armed forces do not usually include the position of Indo-Peranakan interpreters. Instead, they focus on white Dutch staff. Arto is not representative of a hegemonic masculinity within the navy, because he belonged to Chinese and mixed-race minorities. In addition, he was discriminated against both within and outside of the navy. Initially, he could only gain access to the navy by volunteering as an interpreter. The individual effects of these organizational contentions become clear when Arto states that, unlike other categories in the navy, such as professional marines or conscripts, there were few social facilities for interpreters. He writes in his diary: You only received your wages and nothing else. We did not think about it at the time. If you were married, you had a family, and you fell in action, then your relatives would only receive one month’s wages to dry the tears. That way, many families of interpreters would become poverty-stricken. [Je kreeg alleen je soldij en voor de rest niets. Daar stonden we toen niet bij stil. Was je getrouwd en had je een gezin en kwam je te sneuvelen, dan kregen je nabestaanden slechts één maand soldij om de traantjes te drogen. Zo zouden veel gezinnen van tolken aan de bedelstaf raken.] (Birney, 2016, p. 322)

In a conversation between Alan and his twin brother Phil, the latter claims after different investigations into the matter that their father did not receive a pension from the navy because he belonged to the socalled ESD (employé speciale diensten or employee special services). This was the formal name for interpreters. His father never mentioned the ESD because he wanted to be recognized as a marine. ESDs were heavily armed, often more so than the average marine, according to Phil (Birney, 2016, pp. 522–524). The special position of the ESDs becomes clear in Arto’s diary. Here, he describes how the navy used interpreters as sitting ducks to attract enemy fire (Birney, 2016, pp. 331–335, 350) and required them to do the dirty work for others (Birney, 2016, pp. 402, 418–419). The support

116

P. STOLTZ

that Arto eventually received to flee to the Netherlands, amongst other things, came from other marines. This, according to his son Phil, occurred without the formal knowledge of the Dutch authorities (Birney, 2016, pp. 522–524). As an Indo-Peranakan and an Indische Nederlander, Arto struggles with how he can become a member of this military institution—which represents the Dutch nation—while being repeatedly rejected as somebody who does not belong. This matters both during the Indonesian war of independence in the 1940s and during later decades in the Netherlands. These examples illustrate how time, place and space influence whether and how Arto—as well as the other marines who support him—can trouble hegemonic masculinities and inequalities in this military organization, and eventually in Dutch society in general (Stoltz, 2019). Following postcolonial thought on globalization, hegemony and resistance (Krishna, 2009), intersectionality and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011) and critical thinking on military masculinities (Chisholm & Tidy, 2017), I suggest that we think of hegemony in terms of contentions between identities. In addition, I suggest that we understand them here in relation to narrative struggles between hegemonic narratives and counter-narratives about transnational memories. I also suggest that we take what happens in transnational space more seriously (Hearn et al., 2014; Stoltz, 2019).

5.4 Transnational Memories of Decolonization, War and Violence Transnational space influences what ‘we’ know about the past and how ‘we’ know what we know about the past. Transnational memories of decolonization, war and violence also work in a different way during the identity formations of the first generation of postcolonial migrants in comparison to the second generation. What we know about the past in The Interpreter is quite straightforward in a sense: what Arto knows about the past is related to his own experiences, what Alan knows is not (Stoltz, 2019). During the 1940s, Arto keeps a diary, which he brings with him to the Netherlands and once there attempts to turn into a manuscript. He starts by writing a long version and later a shorter one, which he finishes in 1985, the year that he turns 60 (Birney, 2016, p. 479). Alan learns about the past by reading the manuscripts during different stages of his life (Birney, 2016,

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

117

pp. 277–278, 477–480). During his youth, it feels as though these diaries do not concern him, but this changes later (Birney, 2016, p. 278). The ‘trans’ of transnational stands, amongst other things, for ‘transit’, and emphasizes movement in space across national borders (Assmann, 2014). In The Interpreter, memories of the violent conflicts travel abroad with Arto. By focusing on transnational memories, I challenge methodological nationalism (Krishna, 2009; Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) and memory constructions that remain at national levels in understandings of conflict and, relatedly, how memories of conflict influence the lives and identities of individual postcolonial migrants. Let me illustrate this with the movements of Arto’s memories of his experiences, which depend upon the concrete places and times where these happened in Indonesia. The memories travel with him to the other side of the world, to the Netherlands, where both he and his son use these memories of events of mass violence and war crimes in other concrete places and during other times (Stoltz, 2019). The novel begins from the perspective of Alan, who provides a long list, running to almost two pages, containing his father’s experiences of violence during the Japanese occupation and the Indonesian revolution. Victims, perpetrators and bystanders have various nationalities, genders and ethnic identities in this description, and they include both military personnel and civilians, friends, enemies and relatives. Here, Alan describes his father as being both a bystander and a victim, as well as a perpetrator. The graphic descriptions include how the Japanese air force bombed the house of Arto’s parents, the torture that he suffered during the Japanese occupation and how he worked as a guide and interpreter when he and his colleagues interrogated Indonesians who had been strung up to hang upside down from trees. According to Alan, as head of the Department of Interrogation of Prisoners in Djember, Arto made even the toughest prisoners talk (Birney, 2016, pp. 13–14). Later in the novel, the perspective turns to the manuscript that Arto has written based on his diaries. Here, Arto describes how he learned to shoot and states that he had lost track of the number of people he had killed. He felt no remorse because he considered the killings to be revenge for everything the Indonesians had done to him and his fellows. Only one occasion haunted him throughout his life, and that was when he shot a woman and her baby because a Javanese freedom fighter was hiding behind them (Birney, 2016, pp. 324, 363–365).

118

P. STOLTZ

Since descriptions of events of mass violence and war crimes such as these are uncommon in the Netherlands, this leads to issues for both father and son. Arto finds out the hard way that there is no interest in his memories in the Netherlands, not even amongst his peers: No publisher, not even one of the six hundred Indische organizations that were around in the Netherlands at the time, paid any attention to the manuscript that my father kept on sending around. [Geen uitgever, zelfs geen van de zeshondered Indische verenigingen die Nederland toen telde, toonde belangstelling voor het manuscript, dat mijn vader maar blééf rondsturen.] (Birney, 2016, p. 479)

Neither, at an interpersonal level, is the reception of Arto’s memories by his son self-evident. Initially, Alan is uncertain about the truth of parts of the diary/manuscript. His doubts concern, amongst others, the above story about the woman and her baby, which at the same time appears realistic enough (Birney, 2016, p. 207). Other stories that he doubts, and that he attempts to verify, include human rights abuses, such as the story of when a Dutch adjutant put Arto in charge of a transport that was accompanying a hundred prisoners from the state prison in Djember to the railway station of Wonokromo. Afterwards, Arto had to drag out 46 bodies of people who had suffocated during the 14-hour trip in the goods train. According to Arto’s diary, a similar prisoner transport experienced the same outcome. Both resulted in military and political upheavals and attention from the international media. Arto had to appear before a marine court martial. In contrast to some of his colleagues, who ended up with substantial punishments, he was released (Birney, 2016, pp. 385– 399). Other parts of the diary address how, in early 1950, Arto, together with a group of old friends who are active nationalists, engages in struggles with other groups of nationalists. This is after the Dutch had agreed to Indonesian independence (Birney, 2016, pp. 459–465). According to Alan, during this period Arto killed people ‘…with whom he had a bone to pick’ [met wie hij nog een appeltje te schillen had] (Birney, 2016, p. 14). As we can see in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter, at the end of the novel, Alan guesses that his father’s diary is an out-ofproportion vindication of all the misery that Arto had caused in Indonesia. He also realizes that Arto and his colleagues were mass murderers (Birney, 2016, p. 488). Alan directs his anger against his father, whom he despises and does not understand. At the same time, his anger is directed

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

119

equally at Dutch society and its pretended ‘white innocence’ about the use of mass violence and torture during the Indonesian war of independence (see Wekker, 2016). Arto’s transnational memories influence his own and Alan’s identities in different ways. Rothberg calls the link between local and transnational processes of memory politics multidirectional (Rothberg, 2009). The theory of multidirectional memory does not presume that communities are separated from each other before they initiate dialogue. Rather, groups and, relatedly, gendered identities emerge when memories are articulated. They come into being in a dialogical space, a contact or conflict between narratives. This means that the process and relational dimensions of remembrance are important. In addition, it means that forms of dialogue, connection and translation in multidirectional encounters do not take place on a level playing field. This thinking about cross-border multidirectional links can challenge scalar hierarchies and the hegemony of state-sponsored versions of remembering and forgetting the past (Rothberg, 2014b). By foregrounding the power dynamics of the narrative struggles over memories of violence, it becomes possible to show how agency at different levels influences (or does not influence) social narratives about memories of violence in ways that are necessarily both local and transnational in character.

5.5 Masculinities and Transnational Remembering This brings me to the political and normative question: what do we think of the past, present and future? It is not only the intersectional analysis of social inequalities such as that described above, but also renegotiations of masculinities and contestations of intersectional inequalities that are important in intersectional and postcolonial analyses. The methodological intervention using transnational memories, in turn, helps to situate masculinities within transnational space and postcolonial memory politics. This situating is of interest for research on (hegemonic) masculinities and transitional justice. Given the importance of making visible the tensions between different masculinities and how masculinities are deeply entangled with systems of power and post-conflict social, political and economic outcomes, it is essential that we analyse masculine power both within and between the structures that aim to build peace in societies moving out of violence

120

P. STOLTZ

(Hamber, 2016). This includes not only societies that have been suffering from internal conflict, but also those that are geographically located in different parts of the world. The society that is attempting to move out of violence in the case of The Interpreter is mainly the Netherlands, but the focus is also, to a lesser degree, upon (contemporary) Indonesia. Yet, the transnational memories that move between Indonesia and the Netherlands are both local and transnational. Following Beasley, I understand hegemonic masculinity to be a political ideal or model that mobilizes institutions such as the military and practices around violence during conflict and post-conflict transformations (Beasley, 2014). In the case of The Interpreter, the gender order that emerges in transnational space by means of Arto’s memories involves a hegemonic masculinity, which is Dutch, white and colonial. This is recognizable in the narrative about the institution of the colonial armed forces. Arto’s attempts to renegotiate his subordinate and marginalized position as Indo-Peranakan in this institution mattered for his sense of identity and belonging while he was in Indonesia. Importantly, Arto attempted to renegotiate his Indo-Peranakan masculinity into that of a royalist Indische Nederlander (Birney, 2016, p. 437). He attempted to legitimate his violent masculinity both as part of the Dutch colonial armed forces, and by means of the unauthorized violence that he used together with his Indonesian nationalist friends, but in general defence of the Dutch queen and the Netherlands. Global social structures of racism and colonialism impeded his agency and everyday resistance to social inequalities in Indonesia. This left him frustrated, but becoming an Indonesian citizen after Indonesian independence became an increasingly unrealistic option due to his violent actions against Indonesian nationalists (Birney, 2016, pp. 440–446). Beasley has argued that it becomes possible to discuss hegemonic masculinities in vertical as well as horizontal terms if we expand the concept to include supra- and sub-hegemonic forms. This can on the one hand solve problems caused by limited analyses of specific cultures and nation-states, since such a move not only reiterates aspects of globalization, but may on the other hand also produce insufficient assessments of gendered globalization and its multiple transnational contexts (Beasley, 2008, 2014). Let me illustrate this using Arto’s attempts to renegotiate his position. Arto attempts to find a path to obtain at least a sub-hegemonic form of masculinity in the Dutch colonial armed forces as well as in Indonesian society. He succeeds only to a certain extent, by means of his employment

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

121

as an interpreter. To his surprise, the opportunities to obtain a dominant place do not improve once he migrates to the Netherlands. Arto’s subordinate position is reflected in the poor reception to his personal counternarrative of memories of events and contexts of the Dutch past. This controversial narrative challenges the hegemonic Dutch narrative of the past in Indonesia, which in turn has influenced Arto’s sense of identity and belonging. He ends up disappointed about the injustices of racism that he also encounters here and about the inequalities that lead to a lack of recognition of his deeds in defence of queen and country. Arto spends his last few years bitter and disappointed in the south of Spain (Birney, 2016, pp. 480–481, 515). The character of Arto in The Interpreter is violent both during the violent conflicts in Indonesia in the 1940s and after his migration to the Netherlands after peace was signed by means of the forced transferral of sovereignty from the Netherlands to Indonesia in 1949 (see Chapter 3). In the Netherlands, Arto’s path to a dominant masculine place remains unclear, despite the end of WWII in both Europe and Asia and despite the end of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia (see Chapter 3 about postconflict transformations in the Netherlands). This brings me to my next point, which concerns continuities and discontinuities of militarised violence into peacetime and the notion of masculinities within conflict and post-conflict transformations. Research on masculinities, peacebuilding and transitional justice is gradually emerging. These studies challenge linear models of peacebuilding based on the assumption that, once a peace agreement has been signed and combatants disarmed, violent masculinities are ‘tamed’ (Cahn & Ní Aoláin, 2010). They show that masculinity in societies emerging from conflict can explain the roots of sexual and militarised violence. This includes the insight that a key to the ongoing manifestations of violent masculinities in the transformations of post-conflict societies is the co-existence of emasculation with the glorification of past political violence within a context of poor living conditions and deprivation. In other words, violence and masculinity interlink with social and economic conditions, and there is a relation between disempowered men, thwarted masculinities and violent behaviour. Legacies of political violence can therefore linger long into the future (Hamber, 2016, pp. 17–18). We can see this in the case of Arto, who abuses his wife and children in a context in which he glorifies his own past political violence without receiving any social or financial recognition for his services or, for that matter,

122

P. STOLTZ

punishment for his crimes. This means that his memories are not only transnational, but both transnational and local. Their lack of reception in the Netherlands highlights not only his resistance to silences and denials about the violent and racist colonial past, but also his resistance to Eurocentrism, racism and other injustices and inequalities in the present. The Interpreter, as a novel, is interesting in the context of research on masculinities and transitional justice because it highlights the everyday in post-conflict transformations. The novel takes issue with the structures of intersectional inequalities that influence the renegotiation of masculinities. This is important because it moves away from privileging a focus on violent masculinities and direct physical violence, and specifically sexual violence, and the continuities between the violent masculinities of the past and the present. These topics are important, and we cannot ignore them, but they have come to dominate the post-conflict memory scape. This has the effect that the struggles to define the needs and realities of other survivors, such as women, or violence against men and boys, is overshadowed, despite these aspects also being gendered (Brown & Ní Aoláin, 2015; Eriksson Baaz & Stern, 2010, 2014; Hamber, 2016). The main character in the novel is Alan, Arto’s son. By including reflections on the relationship between Alan and his father from Alan’s perspective, and by including conversations with Alan’s mother, twin brother and others outside of the family, it is possible for the reader to consider questions about not only continuities but also discontinuities between past and present in societies emerging from conflict. Hamber argues for the importance of this focus in future research on masculinities, peacebuilding and transitional justice, amongst others, because, by only focusing on militants and soldiers as the main custodians of violence in societies with a politically violent history, there is a risk of creating stereotypes about them. This would be unfortunate because, generally, they are a heterogeneous group (Hamber, 2016). In the case of The Interpreter, one of the stories, for example, concerns how to resist stereotypes of the ‘silent Indisch father’. Alan has great problems recognizing this stereotype in his loud and abusive father, but the stereotype and the hegemonic narratives about the limited use of violence by the Dutch armed forces are so strong that they make Alan doubt the truth behind what his father is repeatedly trying to say. Consequently, Arto’s controversial transnational memories relate to Alan’s struggle to identify and belong. There is a discontinuity and a

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

123

competition between Arto’s and Alan’s renegotiations of their masculinities. Whereas Arto attempts to renegotiate his Indo-Peranakan masculinity into an Indische Nederlander one, Alan’s identity becomes that of an Indo masculinity, by means of the transnational memories of his father and the structures of white innocence in Dutch society. Alan complains about the Dutch and their racism, but he is not prepared to fight for queen and country. For him, the injustices of racism and the inequalities due to a lack of recognition are different. He does not feel at home in the Netherlands, the country of his birth, but he feels even less so in Indonesia (Birney, 2016, pp. 480–481). Alan attempts to become a non-violent man, despite having many aggressive feelings, not in the least towards his despised father. He has spent a large part of his life fighting his father’s madness, but at the end of The Interpreter he stops doing so (Birney, 2016, p. 532).

5.6

Masculinities and Resistance in Transnational Space

Bringing about social change requires access to the social domain. Whereas privileges in relation to whiteness and its influence upon silence, voice and agency were problematized in the last chapter, the voices and agency of marginalized men and masculinities were the focus here. Around the period of the publication of this novel, the Indo author Alfred Birney became a noteworthy narrator who influenced changes in the socalled ‘tellability’ of narratives about the conflict in Indonesia. The Interpreter and the ‘sledgehammer blow’ cited in its subtitle were well received by its Dutch audience. The novel won several literary awards (including the Libris Literary Award and the Henriëtte Roland Holst Award in 2017). At the time of writing in 2019, the rights for translations of the novel have been sold to England, Indonesia and Italy, and a dramatized version is touring as a play through the Netherlands in 2019 and 2020. This provides more opportunities for discussion. From a methodological point of view, this chapter has expanded approaches to the analysis of masculinity by demonstrating the advantages of combining the concept of hegemonic masculinities with postcolonial and intersectional perspectives, and by making a methodological intervention into narratives of transnational memories. Using postcolonial and

124

P. STOLTZ

intersectional approaches in studies of masculinities is increasingly common but, as Beasley has pointed out, the situating of masculinities in transnational space is no simple matter (Beasley, 2008, 2014). In addition, an uncommon focus on both first- and second-generation postcolonial migrant men has provided opportunities to gain more insight into how the relationship between father and son in the novel moved across time, place and space. Notably, combining hegemonic masculinities with thinking about transnational memories as being both transnational and local, alongside taking seriously the politics of location and how past atrocities are spatially grounded, helped to uncover a previously unclear path towards gaining a dominant masculine place for those embedded in a colonial narrative that features marginalized intersections of gender, race and national identity. This has influenced the agency of both father and son, including the opportunities for them to resist hegemonic projects of Eurocentrism, racism and silences about historical injustices, and to find strategies for the future. The results emphasize the importance of a focus on the everyday in post-conflict transformations and on discontinuities between the past and the present in studies of masculinities, peace-building and transitional justice. They show that the relationships between male postcolonial migrants from different generations include roles as both victims and perpetrators as well as bystanders in unclear ways and highlight tensions between individual and collective (national) identities. In the next chapter, I will address the opportunities to re-imagine national identity and nationbuilding during post-conflict transformations without reinforcing inequalities and injustices.

References Assmann, A. (2014). Transnational memories. European Review, 22(4), 546–556. Beasley, C. (2008). Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in a globalizing world. Men and Masculinities, 11(1), 86–103. Beasley, C. (2014). Rethinking hegemonic masculinity in transnational context. In J. Hearn, M. Blagojevi´c, & K. Harrison (Eds.), Rethinking transnational men: Beyond, between and within nations (pp. 29–44). New York, NY: Routledge. Brown, K., & Ní Aoláin, F. (2015). Through the looking glass: Transitional justice futures through the lens of nationalism, feminism and transformative change. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 9(1), 127–149.

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

125

Cahn, N., & Ní Aoláin, F. D. (2010). Gender, masculinities and transition in conflicted societies. New England Law Review, 44(1), 101–123. Chakrabarty, D. (2008). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chisholm, A., & Tidy, J. (2017). Beyond the hegemonic in the study of militaries, masculinities, and war. Critical Military Studies, 3(2), 99–102. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Intersectionality: Theorizing power, empowering theory. Signs, 38(4), 785–810. Christensen, A.-D., & Qvotrup Jensen, S. (2014). Combining hegemonic masculinity and intersectionality. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(1), 60–75. Cohen, S. (2001). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Connell, R. W. (1983). Men’s bodies. In R. W. Connell, Which way is up? (pp. 17–32). Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Connell, R. W. (2014). Margin becoming centre: For a world-centred rethinking of masculinities. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(4), 217–231. Connell, R. W. (2016). Masculinities in global perspectives: Hegemony, contestation, and changing structures of power. Theory and Society, 45(4), 303–318. Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829–859. Cribb, R. (2010). Digital atlas of indonesian history. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. De Cesari, C., & Rigney, A. (2014). Introduction. In C. de Cesari & A. Rigney (Eds.), Transnational memory: Circulation, articulation, scales. Berlin: De Gruyter Press. Donaldson, M., Hibbins, R., Howson, R., & Pease, B. (Eds.). (2009). Migrant men: Critical studies of masculinities and the migration experience. New York, NY: Routledge. Eriksson Baaz, M., & Stern, M. (2010). Understanding and addressing conflictrelated sexual violence: Lessons learned from the Democratic Republic of Congo (Nordic Africa Institute Policy Notes, 2010/3). Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Eriksson Baaz, M., & Stern, M. (2014). Understanding sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. In M. Evans, C. Hemmings, & M. Henry (Eds.), The Sage handbook of feminist theory (pp. 585–605). London: Sage. Erll, A. (2011). Travelling memory. Parallax, 17 (4), 4–18. Freriks, K. (2015). Echo’s van Indië [Echoes from the Indies]. Amsterdam: Atheneum—Polak & Van Gennep. Guha, R. (1998). Dominance without hegemony: History and power in colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

126

P. STOLTZ

Hamber, B. (2016). There is a crack in everything: Problematising masculinities, peacebuilding and transitional justice. Human Rights Review, 17 (1), 1–25. Hancock, A.-M. (2016). ‘We are named by others and we are named by ourselves’: Social constructivism and intersectionality-like thinking. In A.-M. Hancock, Intersectionality: An intellectual history (pp. 1–33). Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford Scholarship Online. Hearn, J. (2015). Men of the world: Genders, globalizations, transnational times. London: Sage. Hearn, J., Blagojevi´c, M., & Harrison, K. (Eds.). (2014). Rethinking transnational men: Beyond, between and within nations. New York, NY: Routledge. Hill Collins, P. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20. Krishna, S. (2009). Globalization and postcolonialism: Hegemony and resistance in the twenty-first century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Limpach, R. (2016). De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor [The burning kampongs of General Spoor]. Amsterdam: Boom. Messerschmidt, J. (2015). Masculinities in the making. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Messerschmidt, J. W. (2019). The salience of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Men and Masculinities, 22(1), 85–91. Nicholls, W., Miller, B., & Beaumont, J. (2013). Introduction: Conceptualizing the spatialities of social movements. In W. Nicholls, B. Miller, & J. Beaumont (Eds.), Spaces of contention: Spatialities and social movements (pp. 1–23). Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Oostindie, G. (2015). Soldaat in Indonesïe: 1945–1950 [Soldier in Indonesia: 1945–1950]. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Radstone, S. (2011). What place is this? Transcultural memory and the locations of memory studies. Parallax, 17 (4), 109–123. Rothberg, M. (2009). Multidirectional memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the age of decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, M. (2014a). Multidirectional memory in migratory settings: The case of post-Holocaust Germany. In C. de Cesari & A. Rigney (Eds.), Transnational memory: Circulation, articulation, scales (pp. 123–146). Berlin: De Gruyter Press. Rothberg, M. (2014b). Afterword: Locating transnational memory. European Review, 22(4), 652–656. Scagliola, S. (2012). Cleo’s ‘unfinished business’: Coming to terms with Dutch war crimes in Indonesia’s war of independence. Journal of Genocide Research, 14(3–4), 419–439. Sierp, A., & Wüstenberg, J. (2015). Linking the local and the transnational: Rethinking memory politics in Europe. Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 23(3), 321–329.

5

MASCULINITIES, INTERSECTIONALITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MEMORIES

127

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Stoltz, P. (2016). Postkoloniale narrativer [Postcolonial narratives]. In I. Glavind Bo, A.-D. Christensen, & T. Lund Thomsen (Eds.), Narrativ forskning—tilgange og metoder [Narrative research—Approaches and methods] (pp. 293–312). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Stoltz, P. (2019). Masculinities, postcolonialism and transnational memories of violent conflicts. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 14(3), 152–167. Törnquist-Plewa, B. (2018). The transnational dynamics of local remembrance: The Jewish past in a former shtetl in Poland. Memory Studies, 11(3), 301–314. Van den Herik, L. (2012). Addressing ‘colonial crimes’ through reparations? Journal of International Criminal Justice, 10, 693–705. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond. Global Networks, 2(4), 301–334. Wojnicka, K., & Pustułka, P. (2019). Research on men, masculinities and migration: Past, present and future. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 14(2), 91–95. Woodward, R., & Duncanson, C. (Eds.). (2017). The Palgrave international handbook of gender and the military. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wüstenberg, J. (2019). Locating transnational memory. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 32(4), 371–382. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage.

Novels Birney, A. (2016). De tolk van Java [The interpreter from Java]. Amsterdam: De Geus. Bloem, M. (1983). Geen gewoon Indisch meisje [No ordinary Indisch girl]. Amsterdam: Maarten Muntinga. Couperus, L. (1900/1994). De stille kracht [The silent power]. Uitgeverij Contact. Dermoût, M. (1955/1980). De tienduizend dingen [The ten thousand things]. Amsterdam: Querido. du Perron, E. (1935). Het land van herkomst [The country of origin]. Amsterdam: G.A. van Oorschot.

128

P. STOLTZ

Gomes, P. (1975). Sudah, laat maar [Sudah, never mind]. Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij (first print); In Gomes, P. (2004). Tropenkind [Tropical child]. Den Haag: Van Stockum (second, revised print). Haasse, H. (1948). Oeroeg. Amsterdam: Querido. Haasse, H. (1992). De heren van de thee [The gentlemen of the tea trade]. Amsterdam: Querido. Multatuli. (1860/1958). Max Havelaar of de koffieveilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij [Max Havelaar or the coffee auctions of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij]. Antwerpen: Ontwikkelingen. Springer, F. (1993). Bandoeng-Bandung. Amsterdam: Querido. van Dis, A. (1994). Indische duinen [Indisch dunes]. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. van Dis, A. (2014). Ik kom terug [I will return]. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Augustus.

CHAPTER 6

Narrating the Nation and Queering Transitional Justice

(The reception hall at 56 East Pegangsaan Street, Jakarta, August 17, 1945 during the Proclamation of Independence.) Indeed it came to pass, that event full of mystery, whose coming Iin Linda Tiwi sensed before it happened: in the moment of silent meditation, while all those present prayed fervently for those who had sacrificed their lives struggling for freedom, at just that meditative moment the microphone, the very Microphone of the Proclamation in the shape of an elegant, modern box…smiled then whispered softly to her, a bit froggily: Speak, speak into me, dear Iin…don’t think that the only ones who have the right to speak into me are the big leaders of the nation or prominent intellectuals, speak!…At special moments I am going to visit you. That’s all for now, Tiwi, FREEDOM! (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 56–57)

When Indonesia became independent in 1945, the promise of the Proclamation of Independence, referred to in the quote above, included that all voices would be heard in the democratic processes that lay ahead. To this day, the old Javanese motto Unity in Diversity is used as a coat of arms for the post-independence state, signifying the importance of a common humanity despite differences in culture, ethnicity and religion. The Pancasila or Five Principles, which were first set out by President Sukarno in 1945, are also important elements of state ideology, including principles of a just and civilized humanity and social justice for all Indonesians. Y. B. Mangunwijaya interprets these ambitions in the above quotation from Durga/Umayi (2004), as though not only © The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_6

129

130

P. STOLTZ

political leaders, but also those who had previously been marginalized under Dutch colonial rule, would get the opportunity to speak into ‘the Microphone of the Proclamation of Independence’. The novel is a counter-narrative to the official narrative of the past that was prevalent during the New Order regime of President Suharto (1967–1998). Durga/Umayi focuses on issues of transitional justice during times of post-conflict transformations. The narrative starts, similarly to the works discussed in previous chapters, during the period of transition from Dutch colonial rule and the Japanese occupation to Indonesian independence and democracy, but ends 45 years later—at the time of publication in 1991—when democratic rule had turned into a military authoritarian dictatorship following the genocide wreaked upon real and alleged Communists (1965–1967). Durga/Umayi addresses implicatory and post-moral denials in relation to the genocide and puts these into the context of the long-term emergence and aftermaths of the genocide (Cohen, 2001; Cohen & Husain, 2008). Mangunwijaya suggests a reimagination of Indonesian national identity and nation-building in a way that I argue remains topical to this day, since he does so by challenging the use of binaries of gender and of women as victims and men as perpetrators that I have argued in the two previous chapters to be problematic. In addition, we can reverse times of colonial rule, as we can authoritarian military rule or democratic rule. The notion of transitional justice works from a series of normative assumptions about truth, justice and reconciliation, but any assumption of a linear transition from war and conflict (during the 1940s and mid 1960s) to peace is nowadays considered too simplistic (Buckley-Zistel, Koloma Beck, Braun, & Mieth, 2014). Central to this chapter is the idea, recently pointed out by feminist transitional justice researchers, that transitional justice can intersect with and may reinforce structural dimensions of marginalization in people’s everyday lives; for example, concerning issues around gender and sexuality (Rooney & Ní Aoláin, 2018, p. 1). Violence against marginalized and vulnerable groups can decrease during post-conflict transformations, but sometimes they may increase or remain the same. In other words, who is vulnerable or marginalized, when and how may or may not change over time. Mangunwijaya addresses this in his novel. We can also see it in contemporary Indonesia, where LGBT persons are currently experiencing an increase in violence, whereas previously such violence was rare (see Boellstorff, 2016; Platt, Davies, & Bennett, 2018; Wieringa &

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

131

Katjasungkana, 2019) and where anti-Communism (problematic in relation to transitional justice discourses concerning the genocide) remains persistent in Indonesian politics (Miller, 2018, p. 287). The aim of this chapter is to discuss the possibilities of re-imagining national identity and nation-building during post-conflict transformations without reinforcing marginalization, intersectional inequalities, social vulnerabilities or injustices in transitional justice thinking in the ways that have been discussed in previous chapters. Genocide studies—as part of transitional justice studies—often uses binaries between victims and perpetrators to explain national identity formations and Otherings during genocide (see Feierstein, 2014). Gender approaches to genocide and transitional justice tend to focus on binaries of women and men, often with a limited thematic of women as victims of sexual violence and men as perpetrators (see Björkdahl & Mannergren Selimovic, 2017; Buckley-Zistel & Stanley, 2012). However, I suggest that it is more useful to combine approaches from feminist transitional justice and critical genocide studies, which uncover the limitations of the uses of binaries (Feierstein, 2014; Rooney & Ní Aoláin, 2018) using queer approaches, which provide alternative ways of thinking about how to avoid the reinforcement of structural dimensions of marginalization in transitional justice (Richter-Montpetit, 2018). I illustrate my points with examples from Durga/Umayi.

6.1

Gender, Sexuality and Transitional Justice

A focus on ‘large-scale, elite, largely male, and highly reified phenomena’ has dominated genocide studies (Von Joeden-Forgery, 2012, p. 96). Scholars often treat both perceptions of what counts as genocide and the term itself as a political or legal label, rather than a social practice. There is also a preoccupation in genocide studies (as opposed to Holocaust studies) with preventing its causes. Consequently, there is less attention given to the issue of how people deal with the memories and trauma, or the aftermath and consequences, of genocide (Hinton, 2012). Transitional justice, in turn, exhibits a preoccupation with post-conflict transformations. In addition, it can be understood as ‘a concept and a process that encompasses a number of different legal, political and cultural instruments and mechanisms that can strengthen, weaken, enhance or accelerate processes of regime change and consolidation’ (Mihr, 2017, p. 1). In other words, transitional justice instruments, mechanisms and

132

P. STOLTZ

processes do not necessarily have positive results, and any assumption of a linear transition from war to peace is too simplistic (Buckley-Zistel et al., 2014; Simic, 2017). We can see this in the case of Indonesia, where democracy and authoritarianism, as well as both high-intensity and lowintensity conflict, have emerged and disappeared at an uneven pace. A controversial event since the independence of Indonesia in 1945 is the genocide wreaked upon (alleged) Communists in 1965 (see Chapter 3). Defining genocide is a sensitive issue, because scholars and practitioners base their definitions on legal, political and social assumptions. Genocide researcher Daniel Feierstein defines genocide as the ‘partial destruction of a national group’ (see also Feierstein, 2014, pp. 68–72). I find this useful because the definition of who can potentially be a victim is open to groups of any kind (see Irvin-Erickson, La Pointe, & Hinton, 2014, p. 8; Jacob, 2019; Waites, 2017, p. 9). In addition, in light of my argument about the translation of global norms to ensure appropriate reactions to genocide, this definition follows the interpretation of genocide by the initiator of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Raphael Lemkin, who also mentioned ‘national groups’. This means that it is possible to include political groups, such as Communists, as part of a national group, even though, initially, Lemkin (due to his Eurocentric reference points) did not explicitly mention political parties as a protected group under the Convention (Feierstein, 2014, pp. 68– 72; see also Jacob, 2019; Lemkin, 1944, Chapter 9; Melvin & Pohlman, 2018). Moreover, this definition has been instrumental in the procedures of the International People’s Tribunal for the 1965 Crimes Against Humanity (IPT 1965), held in 2015. This tribunal addressed the ‘events of 1965’. Since it was a People’s Tribunal, it derived its moral authority from the voices of victims and of national and international civil societies. The format was that of a formal human rights court with the power of prosecution, but not of enforcement. In that sense, it was a Tribunal of Inquiry (Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, p. 36). The facts that were brought before the tribunal by the prosecution included acts ‘against a significant and substantial section of the Indonesian nation or “Indonesian national group” … and were committed with the specific intent to annihilate or destroy that section in whole or in part. This possibly applies also to crimes committed against the Chinese ethnic minority group.’ The findings fall within those enumerated in the Genocide Convention, to which the State of Indonesia is bound under international customary law

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

133

(Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, p. 121). An important point here is that the victims of the 1965–1966 killings constitute a group that can be considered broader than a political group (see also Melvin & Pohlman, 2018, p. 42). The refusal by subsequent Indonesian governments to provide appropriate reactions to this genocide is thus all the more noticeable. The preoccupation of genocide studies with preventing the causes of genocide has led to what Feierstein describes as the emergence of a ‘binary model ’, in which genocide is reduced to a struggle between good and evil. It is a simplistic model ‘that requires each case of genocide to have one and only one victim and one and only one perpetrator. Victims, perpetrators, and accomplices that do not fit the model are ignored or rendered invisible’ (Feierstein, 2014, p. 68). In contrast to this, Feierstein suggests that we should rather understand genocide as a social practice, which unfolds over a long period of time and during which models of both identity and otherness are constructed. Although these constructions of identity and otherness occur more or less simultaneously, it is very possible that the ‘other’ will become demonized only much later in the process. Stereotyping is a necessary step on the path towards genocide (Feierstein, 2014, p. 74). In other words, models that move beyond binaries and understand genocide as a social practice that occurs over a long period of time that extends both before and after the high-intensity violence of such events can better capture the mechanisms of genocide. This includes the points that such a model can help address both the aftermaths of genocide and the prevention of future harm. Historically, the study of gender and genocide has been just as binary and simplistic as the study of genocide in general. Starting in the 1980s, with a focus on women as victims and men as perpetrators during the Holocaust, this has now gradually given way to more sophisticated analyses, which do not prioritize one victim group over another (Altınay & Pet˝ o, 2015a; Von Joeden-Forgery, 2012, pp. 89–90). I suggest that we can fruitfully combine the approach to genocide taken by Feierstein (2014) with queer theory (Boellstorff, 2016; Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017). Similarly to scholarship in genocide and transitional justice, queer scholarship investigates how certain sexual norms and gendered subjects are produced and come to be understood in binary terms. What is most useful about queer scholarship in the context of my argument is that it seeks to interrogate the political effects of this kind of ‘either/or’ thinking and ‘regimes of the normal’ and asks what it means to think instead

134

P. STOLTZ

in ‘and/or’ or ‘neither/nor’ terms (Richter-Montpetit, 2018, p. 226; Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017). This has led queer international relations scholars to study contemporary examples of state-building, the politics of nationalism and national political identification practices. Since the meaning and political consequences of sexual norms and identities, as well as normative understandings of gender and sexuality, are always already entwined with formations of racism, class, citizenship and colonialism, queer approaches are increasingly read intersectionally (Richter-Montpetit & Weber, 2017, pp. 4–8). Here, the thinking of Yuval-Davis on intersectionality and the politics of belonging becomes relevant. She distinguishes between belonging, which refers to emotional attachment in ‘feeling at home’, and the politics of belonging , which concerns both the construction of boundaries and the in/exclusion of particular people, social categories and groupings within these boundaries. The politics of belonging is locally and globally situated and affects different members of collectivities and communities differently. An intersectional approach is therefore of great importance in the analysis of the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). If binary thinking and stereotyping is part of a politics of belonging which, following Lemkin and Feierstein’s thought on genocide, results in ‘the partial destruction of a national group’, then it becomes important to investigate how individuals and groups imagine this national identity and these national groups. This includes a need to ask how the category of ‘nation’ can inter-categorically intersect with understandings of marginalization, with non-normative understandings of gender and sexuality and with national and colonial forms of power in order to construct dangerous figures such as ‘insurgents’ or, in other words, how the category of nation can be rethought in more inclusive ways. During times of post-conflict transformation, this becomes important because ‘the partial destruction of national groups’ during genocide could potentially include any group that is defined as ‘other’ by the perpetrator—from Communists or Chinese ethnic minorities to queer groups or, for that matter, card players (see also Irvin-Erickson et al., 2014, p. 8; Waites, 2017, p. 9). This emphasizes the importance for transitional justice thinking to analyse who is vulnerable or marginalized, when and how, since this may or may not change over time. The ‘queer turn’ in the research field of international relations— as an overarching research field encompassing both transitional justice and genocide studies—is commonly associated with studying LGBT

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

135

people and LGBT human rights. However, queer international relations researcher Melanie Richter-Montpetit suggests a certain distinction between LGBT studies and queer theory. Both challenge common-sense assumptions about heterosexuality as the default norm for sexuality and kinship (or heteronormativity) and the twin premise of two so-called opposite and complementary gender positions (or cissexism). Even so, there are differences in that, on the one hand, an LGBT perspective sees LGBT people as pre-given rights-seeking subjects. These subjects enter a political field in order to seek those rights. Queer international relations perspectives, on the other hand, refuse to assume a stable, rights-seeking, liberal political subject (Otto, 2018; Richter-Montpetit, 2018, pp. 224– 225). Rather, queer perspectives seek to trouble and destabilize—in other words render queer—what they term ‘regimes of the normal’. This means that, by conceptualizing sexuality and gender as part of wider relations of power and normalization, queer scholarship reveals their contingent and therefore political character (Richter-Montpetit, 2018, pp. 224–225). I find this rendering queer of narratives of national identity useful but argue in addition that a focus on norms and normativities of gender and sexuality can be helpful in uncovering intersectional inequalities as well as changes in social vulnerabilities in narratives of nation-building over time. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the possibilities of re-imagining national identity and nation-building during post-conflict transformations without reinforcing marginalization, intersectional inequalities or injustices. After introducing the novel Durga/Umayi, the argument proceeds as follows. Firstly, I argue that the making of binaries and boundaries is always part of narratives of national identity, but that there are limitations to their usefulness if we want to explain national identity in relation to acts of genocide. In addition, they can hinder the imagining of inclusive ways of understanding national identity. I use Feierstein’s ideas about genocide, the queer approach by Richter-Montpetit (2018) and the intersectional approach developed by Yuval-Davis (2011) to make my point and exemplify my argument by showing how Mangunwijaya attempts to move beyond binaries and embrace a fluid and inclusive national identity-formation. I do this by asking: who are the ‘we’ of the nation in Durga/Umayi? Secondly, I argue that if, following Feierstein, we want to understand genocide as a social practice over a long period, then this requires us to pay special attention to structural inequalities and changes in positions of

136

P. STOLTZ

vulnerability over time (Feierstein, 2014). In this context, a queer analysis of changes in norms and normativity in narratives of nation-building is important. Here, queer theory becomes useful because it can help us to uncover silence, voice and agency in narratives of nation-building. Mangunwijaya wrote Durga/Umayi during the New Order regime, which meant that there were constraints upon what he could write, and what readers of different ages and in different localities could know about norms, marginalizations, intersectional inequalities and social vulnerabilities over time. Consequently, I ask: what do ‘we’, in the novel, know about the past? Finally, I argue that combining approaches from feminist transitional justice, critical genocide studies and queer studies is useful when imagining how to address the moral and political dilemmas that can be the result of problematic binaries of good and evil. I ask: what do ‘we’ think of past, present and future? In Durga/Umayi, Mangunwijaya not only resists silences and denials by questioning binaries, but also addresses the importance of including analyses of interdependence and global entanglements. If scholars of transitional justice want to understand how structural inequalities, marginalizations and social vulnerabilities emerge in public policies during post-conflict transformations, and if practitioners want to consider how to avoid reinforcing marginalizations, intersectional inequalities and injustices in transitional justice, then Mangunwijaya’s imagined futures in Durga/Umayi are highly relevant. His overall focus in the novel on democratic dialogue and the pursuit of global justice and equality render queer what is normal in the Indonesia of the early 1990s and encourages readers to imagine a different understanding of the past than that suggested by the state, to question present inequalities and injustices and to imagine an alternative future.

6.2

Durga/Umayi

Durga/Umayi starts with a foreword entitled Foreshadowplay (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 19–23). This is a reference to Indonesian shadow plays or wayang , and to the puppeteer and singer who sit behind a screen and narrate the dialogues of the different characters in the story. A traditional orchestra (a gamelan orchestra) sits in the background and provides a melody for the all-night performances. Wordplay and music are important in shadow plays, as are the different voices used by the puppeteer while performing (Keeler, 2004, p. 1), such as here:

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

137

Whereupon once at that time an idea a tale old stories betold about ooh oahem ahem ohem ohem my dear manly spouse ooh oahem ahem ohem my pretty wife pretty one. (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 19)

The wayang tradition has existed for over 1000 years in Indonesia. Since 2008, wayang puppet theatre has been included on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The word wayang in Old Javanese means ancestor or shadow and its derivative, hyang, is used to describe deities, while eyang denotes ancestors (Lis, 2018, p. 257). Wayang plays are based on stories from the Indian epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Two of the stock characters in these epics are Durga and Umayi. These are two names for the same goddess. She can appear in beautiful and virtuous form as Umayi as well as being monstrous and dangerous as Durga. The names of the goddess sum up the contradictions in the book’s main character (Keeler, 2004, pp. 1–3). What is important for my argument is that they also provide a binary between good and evil, which is used to describe the same character. This character, in turn, symbolizes the Indonesian nation. It is common in Indonesia to use classical wayang stories and stock characters to address moral and political dilemmas. The original repertoire reflects the influence and domination of Hinduism and the Indian subcontinent on Java, whereas, later, wayang was used to popularize Islam and Christianity. Although wayang was depoliticized during Dutch colonial rule, it was used for propaganda purposes to fight for independence during the late 1940s. The use of wayang as a propaganda tool and to legitimize authority continued during the rules of both President Sukarno and President Suharto (Lis, 2018, p. 257; Poplawska, 2004). Y. B. Mangunwijaya (1929–1999) was a priest, architect and social activist who was deeply concerned with addressing inequalities and pursuing social justice. He was also a writer. Durga/Umayi (2004) draws on his lifelong experience of places and events in Indonesia, as well as his studies and travels abroad (Hunter, 1991). In Durga/Umayi, he combines his engagement with well-known stories and characters with the possibilities of a novel. At the beginning of each chapter of Durga/Umayi there appears the image of a wayang character. The character of the woman who is the lead protagonist of the novel repeatedly refers to the stock characters of Durga and Umayi in her considerations of which strategies

138

P. STOLTZ

she should use to address specific situations and events. In this way, Mangunwijaya can mould embodied experiences into his characters, while at the same time using binaries to address moral and political dilemmas. He challenges the stereotypes and binaries of the wayang in order to address the real-life moral and political dilemmas that have faced Indonesia over time. The result provides a nuanced, complex and affecting way of narrating the past, present and future of Indonesia. An example is found here, during the time of the Indonesian revolution, when the lead character ‘Tiwi’ considers the following: Lady Uma who is beautiful and powerful and at the same time Durga who is evil a murderer and cause of plagues that torture mankind, oh don’t let it turn out Tiwi has to take on Durga’s part, this was what was distressing Tiwi when late at night in the darkness of midnight she couldn’t sleep and tossed about in her mind, could it be that this is the fate of a child of the Revolution, the child of a time when murder rape and pillaging turn into everyday events; when heroes and bandits are in the same unit; when smart honest statesmen have to sit in the same cabinet with opportunistic adventurers lackeys of foreign capital…? (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 75)

The narrative is set against the background of the promise of Indonesian independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1945, following the end of the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies during the Pacific War. This narrative of Indonesian nation-building is linked to the life of one woman, who symbolically represents the Indonesian nation and faces the moral and political dilemmas of the different times. The woman has multiple names; apart from Tiwi in the quote above, she is also called Iin, Linda, Punyo, etc. She uses these names depending upon the strategies that she chooses when facing different situations. Relatedly, she regularly changes occupation, from ‘maid’, to ‘prostitute’, to ‘international businesswoman’ dealing in drugs and arms and investing in tourism projects. She also regularly changes her appearance by means of plastic surgery in Singapore, in order to match her face to her constantly transforming identity in the best way possible. Gender, sexuality and violence are addressed in different ways in the novel. During the war for independence, the main character, who initially worked as a maid, decides, for example, to enter a troop of female irregulars, since she realizes that:

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

139

… as a woman she had to have the strength to defend herself, not just the skill to wash clothes or cook in a public kitchen, both from the live-or-die NICA but also from her own people especially the males among them … (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 68)

The NICA are the Netherlands Forces Intelligence Service. Shortly afterwards, Dutch intelligence agents rape and torture her in a brutal manner, then throw her in prison, where she remains for years until she is finally released after ‘Bung Karno had succeeded in coming back to 56 East Pegangsaan Street’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 76–77). (Bung Karno or Brother/Comrade Karno implies President Sukarno.) In other words, after the Dutch aggressions and the internal struggles amongst nationalists during the late 1940s, when we can interpret the occurrence of gender-based violence both literally and symbolically, as Indonesian independence is consolidated and recognized. The narrative follows the early nation-building of the 1950s, which was characterized by contacts with the anticolonial New Emerging Forces in Asia and Africa, but also by increasing corruption and economic disarray. Discussions about women’s rights, of which President Sukarno was initially a proponent, emerge and then disappear when he takes several wives. In the novel, ‘Tiwi’ is critical of this behaviour by Sukarno, as she is of discussions that she should marry (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 94). In secret, she has already married, or rather, she has shacked up with ‘… a certain number of foreigners, some from Beijing, and then after 1966, from Nagasaki, Hong Kong and Singapore, this was a way of life that every religion condemns of course but what the hell …’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 91). While she moves around the world, getting rich as ‘a woman with a career of international stature’ (or how post-colonial and post-independence Indonesia gains political and economic allies around the world), she justifies her behaviour by claiming that ‘… all this was only a means of nation-building particularly woman building in this crucial era of cultural transition’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 92). The economic politics of the 1950s led to increased intersectional inequalities and corruption. It also led to increased political tensions between Communists, Muslims and the army. ‘Iin’ becomes involved in international lobbying and espionage during the Cold War (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 68–78 and 81), leading up to the ‘events of 1965’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 111–138) and the subsequent installing of the authoritarian regime, the trajectory of which Mangunwijaya describes

140

P. STOLTZ

until the late 1980s. Then, the narrative continues into the future, representing Mangunwijaya’s framing of the moral and political dilemmas around marginalization and transitional justice that face the nation.

6.3

Queering National Identity

Within genocide studies, it has been suggested that the making of binaries and boundaries in narratives on national identity is useful, since genocide includes a paradigm of identity construction by exclusion. Binaries, preferably between victims and perpetrators, good and evil, are used by these scholars to explain national identity formations and Othering during genocide. Genocide is the partial destruction of a national group, and this destruction, the reasoning goes, requires perpetrators to make simplifications about time, place and agency, by means of the use of (gendered) stereotypes and binaries. Otherness is part of both personal identity and the identity of every modern nation-state. In order to purge ourselves of this otherness—and to kill people—a number of interlocking processes are involved. This includes a process of ‘normalization’ (creating a ‘normal ’ identity, which reduces the multiple dimensions of identity to one). It also includes a process of alienation and dehumanization of collective identities (including unacceptable forms of deviance from the ‘normal identity’ for categories of social actors) and, finally, a process of suppressing the sense of right and wrong and the development of insensitivity to the suffering of strangers (Feierstein, 2014, p. 75). In the case of Indonesia, perpetrators of the 1965 genocide saw themselves as shaping the character of their nation by removing a category of people whom they considered could never be a legitimate part of it, because they were members of the Communist Party (Jacob, 2019). However, Feierstein argues, the binary gaze that embraces the notion that one group has annihilated another group obscures not only other perpetrators and other victims, but also prevents us from making sense of genocide as a social practice (Feierstein, 2014, pp. 69 and 74). How then, can we imagine national identity in ways that do justice to Feierstein’s suggestions about genocide as a social practice? Let me illustrate this with the help of my first research question and Mangunwijaya’s suggestion for describing the ‘we’ of the nation in Durga/Umayi. In this novel, Mangunwijaya engages with binaries and stereotypes by playing—humorously—with a particular tension. On the one hand, this

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

141

concerns the binary of good and evil in the characters of Durga and Umayi. On the other hand—although this is a fictional re-imagination of Indonesian nation-building and who is included in this nation—there is an implicit engagement with non-fictional memories of social, political and economic contexts that include mass violence, torture and other crimes against humanity and with relations to non-fictional perpetrators, victims and bystanders. If, following Feierstein, I understand genocide as a social practice that takes place over a long period, then what should I call the main character in a novel who is symbolically representing the nation and who needs to be able to represent many different (previously and potentially) socially vulnerable as well as (previously and potentially) powerful groups? How should I capture intersectional inequalities in a society? I do not write novels, but Mangunwijaya’s suggestions in Durga/Umayi illustrate how one can trouble and destabilize—render queer—the political character of relations of power and normalization (see Richter-Montpetit, 2018, pp. 224–225) and how intersectional inequalities such as those relating to categories of gender, class and sexuality matter in this context (RichterMontpetit, 2018; Yuval-Davis, 2011). In his re-imagination of the nation in Durga/Umayi, Mangunwijaya simply uses many names: … in the local spirit of compromise and of the harmony so much promoted by the authorities we’d do best to call the lady Pu(an) Nyo(nya) Nusamusbida, or in full Punyo Iin Sulinda Pertiwi Nusamusbida (even though the lady herself preferred to be called by her more familiar names Iin or Linda or Tiwi or later, Nus or Nussy or Bi, depending on the situation and mood). (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 25)

What, then, do all these names mean? Whom does Mangunwijaya include in the character of the Indonesian nation in the novel? Punyo is an invented combination of the archaic title for a female aristocrat, puan, and nyonya, a Dutch or other high-status, socially distant woman (Mangunwijaya, 2004, note 25 as explained on p. 175). Insulinde is a combination of the Latin words insula, island, and indiae, Indies, and Ibu Pertiwi is a common national personification of Indonesia or the Indonesian Motherland. A reference to Pertiwi is made, for example, in the anthem Indonesia Pusaka, which is often played at Independence Day celebrations. Yuval-Davis suggests that national narratives can play two complementary (observe!) roles. Firstly, they seek to construct national boundaries

142

P. STOLTZ

of the inside ‘us ’ versus the outside ‘them’ (in other words, they create a binary—such as Durga/Umayi). Secondly, they provide space for cultural and other forms of difference within the nation (in other words, they trouble this binary—such as the fictional and non-fictional characters in the novel). The membership body of the nation is never perceived in such narratives as homogeneous, since it contains differences in such aspects as gender, generation, class, ability, sexuality, ethnicity and race. During times of population movements and change, these narratives of inclusion and exclusion tend to become mixed up and cause a blurring of the hegemonic national boundary, according to Yuval-Davis (2011, p. 97). Let us now look at the two complementary roles of narratives of the nation in Durga/Umayi, starting with the first one, concerning the constructions of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. This is not as straightforward as it seems. The symbolic representation of a nation by the figure of a woman is quite common. Given the violent past of Indonesia, Mangunwijaya even describes Iin as ‘what people from France…call a femme fatale’, but he is well aware that ‘the Indonesian context differs completely from what experts from foreign countries, especially the West, make subject to analysis’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 27). Researchers such as Yusuf (2018), Lugano (2017), and An-Na‘im (2013) have emphasized the importance of understanding and engaging with colonial legacies in transitional justice in postcolonial polities, arguing that this is critical to the prospects of success. This implies, for example, that intersectional inequalities can be the consequence of colonial legacies. We can recognize this in Durga/Umayi. By insisting on the use of many names and altered appearances for his protagonist, Mangunwijaya attempts to avoid falling into the ‘trap’ of so-called methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) in the descriptions of national identity and Iin’s genealogy. In the novel, the young nationstate is not the only natural starting point. Whereas Iin is a symbol of the young independent nation, her parents are symbols of the old, colonized Dutch East Indies. Her mother, Legimah, is a fried-cassava snack seller. Iin’s father rapes his wife, and she is the mistress of a Japanese officer, before she dies of the plague (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 28–35). Her father, Obrus, in turn, is a corporal in the KNIL (the Royal Dutch Indies Army), who becomes a heiho, or a soldier who works with the Japanese Occupation during the Pacific War. He gets ‘caught up in a group of

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

143

anti-Japanese heroes’ in Yogyakarta, before peacefully passing away on Independence Day in 1945 (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 29–37). Not only colonial legacies, but also related transnational and global processes form (Iin’s/Indonesia’s) national identity. International economic relations and the Cold War are both important reference points. Many perpetrators of the 1965 genocide upon Communists assumed that the superpowers had stimulated the conflicts in Indonesia after 1945 and backed their own actions, because the interests of the superpowers their interests in destroying this enemy were similar to their own (Jacob, 2019). We can see this most clearly when Mangunwijaya suggests that Iin might have different parents. Whereas the version of the neighbours in her village tell the story about Legimah and Obrus: … according to Who’s Who, the capital’s influential publication, which is underwritten by several bona fide banks that have gone public, is the daughter of Professor Gilbert Washington Bsc. MBA PhD. ThD (not his real name) and Bendoro Raden Ayu Theresia Ursula Nurhayati Tejakusumaningrum (also not her real name), so two versions circulated, the villagers’ version and the elite’s version … (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 43)

The names of this last set of parents indicate an American professor father and an aristocratic Javanese mother, adding hybrid nationalities to elements of class in national identity. As Mangunwijaya points out, this means that Iin’s biography becomes ‘shrouded in a cloud of mystery, inviting a lot of impassioned guessing’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 43 and 181). The second complementary role of narratives of the nation focuses on diversity within the nation. Here, Mangunwijaya suggests how readers could recognize intersectional inequalities within national identity. He does this by giving the main character Iin a twin brother, Brojol. Being a twin means that Brojol also represents the nation. Whereas Iin eventually belongs to an elite (a female aristocrat, etc.), her twin brother is not only a man (gender), but he is also a poor peasant (class), who is often forgotten in the narrative by both Iin and other national and international political and economic elites. We can also recognize heteronormativity (or heterosexuality as the default norm for sexuality and kinship) in relation to national identity in the novel. Iin has male lovers and her brother Brojol is married to a

144

P. STOLTZ

woman, his own Goddess Sri, who is the goddess of rice (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 29–41). By queering national identity—moving beyond either/or thinking and ‘regimes of the normal’ and thinking in and/or terms—Mangunwijaya’s description of Indonesian national identity has become fluid and inclusive, dynamic and multiple. Iin, her parents and her brother form Indonesian national identity by means of domestic and international politics of belonging, by in/exclusions and diversities.

6.4

Narrating the Nation

Queer scholarship interrogates the political effects of binaries and either/or thinking, such as during events of genocide. Genocide is also a social practice that includes structural inequalities and changes in positions of social vulnerability over long periods. Queer theory can uncover such structural inequalities by focusing on norms and normativities around gender and sexuality and social vulnerability concerning, for example, Communism in narratives about the 1965 genocide. Durga/Umayi is useful as a source to illustrate this, but it is also a controversial novel. Social narratives consist of a multiplicity of stories and narratives that tell us something about a group such as a national group (Shenhav, 2015). Durga/Umayi is one such narrative, but it is a counter-narrative to the official hegemonic, state-sponsored narratives of the genocide being promulgated by the authoritarian military regime at the time of publication. This is remarkable, because the generations of Indonesians who grew up after 1965 heard few other versions. It also makes it pertinent to ask: what do ‘we’, in the novel, know about the past? In addition to the novel, and before I continue, I would like to describe what scholars know about the genocide and how, over the decades, the Indonesian state has presented the hegemonic and strategic narrative about this genocide. The September 30 Movement (Gerakan Tiga Puluh September or G30S) refers to the night of 30 September 1965. On this night, a small group of middle-ranking army officers, who were supportive of President Sukarno, had planned, with the help of a few PKI leaders, to abduct seven high-ranking generals, and bring them to the President, on suspicion that they were preparing a military coup against him (PKI stands for Partai Komunis Indonesia, the Indonesian Communist Party). During the action, six of these generals were murdered, while the seventh escaped,

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

145

and instead his lieutenant was murdered. Over the decades, the military, politicians, lawyers, academics and memory activists have explained these events in various ways, but as Wieringa and Katjasungkana and the judges of the IPT 1965, among others, point out, immediately afterwards, the army declared this an attempted coup by the PKI (Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, pp. 45–46; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, p. 1). At the time, there were strong political tensions between the army—which was largely anti-Communist—and the PKI, as well as between Muslim groups and the PKI. This had already led to some violence (Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, p. 1). From that day on, and for many years to come, however, the military, backed by various youth groups that were equipped and/or supported by the military and the government, targeted the PKI. They also targeted its affiliate organizations, their members, supporters and families as well as those alleged to be sympathetic to its aims, along with others having no connection at all with the PKI. They did this by means of killings, imprisonment and enslavement, as well as torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, exile and propaganda (Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, pp. 117–121). After 1965, the mass violence weakened the position of President Sukarno to such a degree that in 1967 General Suharto formally took over as President, establishing an authoritarian and pro-Western military regime (Kammen & McGregor, 2012). An example of a hegemonic and strategic narrative of these events is the state-endorsed propaganda film The Treason of the September 30 Movement/PKI [Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI ]. From 1984 onwards, this film was compulsory viewing in schools and was screened on television during the annual commemoration of the elimination of the PKI and the victory of the military regime on 1 October each year. As far as I know, at the time of writing in 2019, it still is. According to this propaganda, the PKI was responsible for the conflict and the chaotic situation, whereas the military regime of President Suharto saved the country from the Communists by restoring order (Lis, 2018, p. 254; see also Heryanto, 2006; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, p. 14). That is, the propaganda justified the ruling regime by using binaries of good (military) and evil (Communists), thereby influencing ideas about Indonesian national identity and belonging. I would like to combine insights from Feierstein (2014) and RichterMontpetit (2018) in order to illustrate the use of binaries of good and evil in the propaganda of this hegemonic narrative. Slander about PKI women in the narrative can also help me to illustrate a way of alienating

146

P. STOLTZ

and dehumanizing members of Gerwani and other women by creating an unacceptable form of deviance from the ‘normal identity’ of women as following norms of so-called Ibuism (Suryakusuma, 1996). A common starting point for understanding gender and sexuality is in binaries. Gender perceived as two opposite and complementary gender positions is sometimes called cissexism, and heterosexuality as the default norm for sexuality and kinship is known as heteronormativity. Both the hegemonic, state-endorsed narrative in Indonesia and the counternarrative in Durga/Umayi use binaries, as well as intersectional inequalities and social vulnerabilities, although they do so in different ways. Researchers on gender and sexuality in Indonesia have pointed out that ideologies of gender, family and morality became important in state efforts to promote particular views of national citizenship, development and nation-building following independence. Official notions of femininity were highly circumscribed both during and prior to Suharto’s New Order Regime, with women’s citizenship closely tied to their duties as wives and mothers in relations of heterosexual monogamous marriage. The moral and practical boundaries of men’s citizenship were much broader (Platt et al., 2018, pp. 1–5). In 1996, Julia Suryakusuma developed the notion of State Ibuism. Ibu means mother, as in Ibu Pertiwi or the Indonesian Motherland, which is a name that Mangunwijaya also plays with. State Ibuism can thus be termed state motherism. Suryakusuma describes this as an ideology that ‘defines women as appendages and companions to their husbands, as procreators of the nation, as mothers and educators of children, as housekeepers, and as members of Indonesian society – in that order’ (Suryakusuma, 1996, p. 1). She also notes that ‘sexual behavior, however bad, is tolerated if kept under wraps, but condemned if it becomes public’ (Suryakusuma, 1996, p. 1). Ibuism is interesting, because state-sponsored narratives of the genocide combined propaganda promoting anti-Communism with slander about the alleged castration, seduction and murder of the generals by young female members of the PKI. This slander resulted in the observation that members of Gerwani (the Indonesian Women’s Movement or Gerakan Wanita Indonesia) were singled out for persecution (Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, p. 120; Wieringa, 2002, 2003; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, pp. 5–14 and 106). At the time, the PKI was the third largest Communist party in the world and had a firm base in other mass organizations, such as Lekra [Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat; Institute of People’s Culture] and Gerwani. The propaganda concerned all of these

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

147

organizations and contributed to the spread of violence and the continued persecution and discrimination against victims (Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, p. 120; Wieringa, 2002, 2003; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, pp. 5–14). Queer scholarship encourages us to think beyond notions of either/or and to combine the queering of norms with an analysis of intersectional inequalities and social vulnerabilities (Richter-Montpetit, 2018). I assume that, for reasons of safety, in his counternarrative in Durga/Umayi, Mangunwijaya had to be careful about how he presented issues of intersectional inequalities relating, for example, to gender, class and nationality as well as social vulnerabilities in relation to Communism, in order to avoid the censorship that existed under the military regime of the early 1990s. Interestingly, Mangunwijaya includes descriptions of the main character Iin’s engagement with Gerwani and her relations to the PKI and organizations that sympathized with the PKI. These descriptions are quite recognizable to the initiated; we could compare, for example, Chapters 4 and 5 of Durga/Umayi with descriptions of Gerwani in Wieringa and Katjasungkana (2019). Here they write that, by 1965, Gerwani was one of the largest women’s organizations in the world with 1.5 million members. It based its activities on nationalist, socialist and feminist ideologies and explicitly opposed norms that cast Indonesian women as nothing more than loyal wives, homemakers and devoted mothers. The organization demanded space for women in the public sphere, denounced violence against women and polygyny and advocated equal marriage rights (Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019, p. 106). Returning to the novel, Mangunwijaya describes Iin (who represents the nation) as a member of Gerwani and thus opposed to the binaries of the norms of Ibuism. At the same time, he goes beyond these binaries because he also describes Iin as having a relationship with President Suharto and his regime. It is noticeable that, despite his open critique of Indonesian society and its gender relations, Mangunwijaya never mentions the name of President Suharto. Nevertheless, one of the characters ‘…whose name must still be kept secret’ (p. 157) is a bald youth with a wooden rifle who is a double agent. Iin meets this character during the war of independence, when she works as a ‘maid’ for President Sukarno. The bald youth is clearly reminiscent of President Suharto in his appearance and actions over the years and he turns up on a regular basis throughout the novel. Iin (in all her transformations) and the bald youth are lovers, although they have only irregular contact. Both are veterans

148

P. STOLTZ

who started out poor, but eventually they become rich business partners. When needed, the bald youth helps Iin with a new passport or identity (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 48, 125, and 156–158). This means that, in Mangunwijaya’s narrative, Indonesian nation-building includes both the army and Gerwani, rather than either/or. My interpretation is that Mangunwijaya wants to say that those who can be victims or perpetrators at one point in time, can have love or business relationships during other periods. Durga/Umayi also helps me to illustrate how we can imagine the emergence of intersectional inequalities. Iin forgets about her brother Brojol and his family, leaving them socially vulnerable. As a woman, she evolves into a rich, unmarried, politically active veteran and businessperson, whereas her brother as a man remains an impoverished, married and marginalized farmer. Intersectional inequalities of gender and class also relate to global inequalities. Together with both national and international business connections, Iin set up a prestigious tourism project reminiscent of Disneyworld, the Dutch miniature park Madurodam and Madame Tussauds. This park forced Brojol, his wife and mother-in-law to resettle from their village in Java, because ‘… she had forgotten to ask or to look … where the project was to be located … Madame was busy with … lobbying and diplomacy concerning weapons supplies for all sides in Lebanon, Iran, and …’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 143). These descriptions indicate that Mangunwijaya has problems with the ways in which the increasingly rich Indonesian elites were forgetting about the poor. In addition, Mangunwijaya’s description of intersecting power relations according to categories of gender and class problematize how changing positions of power can be imagined beyond such stereotypes as poor women and rich men.

6.5

Resisting Marginalization in Transitional Justice

How do we reimagine narratives of nations and nation-building, without falling into the traps of binaries in transitional justice thinking? Binaries might provide an immediate reaction, but they are limited in relation to broader needs after mass violence and genocide. Over time, they may reinforce structural dimensions of marginalization, inequalities and injustices. Moral outrage about genocidal social practices relates to moral responsibility. Feierstein teaches us that we are an inseparable part of any social practice prevailing in society, and therefore morally responsible for

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

149

its effects. This insight is important if we want to banish genocide as a tool of social engineering (Feierstein, 2014). In a recent interview by Altınay and Pet˝ o, feminist memory and genocide scholar Hirsch highlighted the potential of grasping moral responsibility through notions of vulnerability and fundamental interdependence. Vulnerability is something we all share as embodied beings, she argued. It can be the result of both social and economic processes. Recognizing this is to acknowledge a fundamental interdependence (Altınay & Pet˝ o, 2015b, p. 395). Vulnerability is also central to Rooney and Ní Aoláin’s argument, that transitional justice can intersect with and may reinforce structural dimensions of marginalization in people’s everyday lives. They argue that this emphasizes the necessity to address vulnerability, marginality and exclusion in transitional justice measures and to engage with the conditions that produce systematic and sustained human rights violations in transitional societies. In addition, the argument of these authors emphasizes the need to pay attention to individuals and groups at the margins and their agency in everyday acts of resistance (Rooney & Ní Aoláin, 2018, p. 1). Similarly to critical genocide studies and feminist transitional justice, queer theory can help here in rethinking transitional justice because its focus on the effects of binaries can reveal marginalizations and structural inequalities. In addition, queer research enables us to address questions about marginalized and dissident voices through its focus on the analysis of norms, normativities and the roles that these can play in challenging linear political visions of transcending the past and in imagining visions of national identity and solidarity that recognize the complexity of past complicities and resistances. That is, queer approaches can help to reimagine the future. Let me illustrate my line of thinking with Mangunwijaya’s queer understanding of Indonesian nation-building by asking: what do ‘we’ think of past, present and future in the novel? Previously, we could see how Mangunwijaya addresses problems relating to the reinforcement of marginalization and structural inequalities in Indonesia during the period of postconflict transformations after independence as well as after the genocide of 1965. He does this by rendering queer ‘regimes of the normal’. As I indicated above, the hegemonic narrative promulgated by the New Order regime demonstrates implicatory and post-moral denials of responsibility

150

P. STOLTZ

(Cohen & Husain, 2008) of the 1965 genocide. In his fictional counternarrative in the novel, Mangunwijaya criticizes the lack of transitional justice efforts made by the New Order regime. He is also critical of the way in which international actors were complicit in this. Relatedly, I find it noteworthy that the non-fictional IPT 1965 judges concluded in 2015 that the USA, the UK and Australia were indeed all complicit to different degrees in the commission of crimes against humanity during the genocide, and that they were all aware of what was taking place in Indonesia at the time (Final Report IPT 1965, 2017, pp. 120–121). Mangunwijaya seems to have already been aware of this in the early 1990s. He uses the binaries of Durga and Umayi, of good and evil, to discuss the moral and political dilemmas posed by these denials made by national and international actors to the Indonesian nation (to Iin as a member of the political and economic elite, and to her brother Brojol as her marginalized counterpart and representative of the poor and ‘silent masses’). He does this by considering how these dilemmas should relate to imaginings of transitional justice without the reinforcement of structural dimensions of marginalization in everyday lives. This becomes especially clear at the end of the novel, as this is set in the future. I would like to suggest that vulnerability, interdependence and global entanglements have been important in the previous illustrations that I have taken from Durga/Umayi. It is probably safe to say that denial of responsibility for both the short- and long-term effects of genocide or a withholding of the truth about genocide in the fictional novel seems unhelpful, according to Mangunwijaya. He shines the spotlight on the long-term detention and discrimination inflicted against many people, including members of Lekra and Gerwani by means of Iin. After she returns from an international business trip, intelligence officers pick her up at the airport, accuse her of being a Communist and throw her in jail. ‘… how useless it would be to deny it; that indeed this Mrs. Nusamusbida was once a Lekra and Gerwani leader, she admitted to all of that …’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 163). In the fictional counter-narrative in the novel, Iin, or this Mrs. Nusamusbida, still represents the Indonesian nation and is not excluded from it, as the non-fictional state-endorsed hegemonic narrative would have liked to do with members of Lekra and Gerwani. Freedom of the press and international pressure can be important in cases of moral and political denial of responsibility for human rights crimes, in order to attract national and international attention to human rights abuses and

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

151

injustices. In the fiction of the novel, observers from the national mass media applaud the good news of Iin’s detention. Simultaneously ‘this news was also taken up by foreign mass media and Amnesty International so a furious polemic exploded overseas in the papers and bulletins which are indeed “free and liberal”, printed and published without a Letter of Authorization to Print or Permit to Operate a Press’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 164). This means that, unfortunately, in Mangunwijaya’s counter-narrative, the international outcry and plea for human rights is of no avail and Iin remains in jail. I interpret this as demonstrating that he understands the non-fictional political situation upon which he wants to comment in the novel to involve an unfortunate decrease in international attention to Indonesian human rights abuses. We could agree that it would be good to put in place an appropriate form of transitional justice measures after events of genocide. As my definition of transitional justice indicates, the choice of measure does not necessarily guarantee a successful outcome. If we want to avoid the reinforcement of structural and intersectional inequalities, then one suggestion is to pay special attention to national and international business interests in the wake of violent conflicts. At least this is what Mangunwijaya seems to suggest. In Durga/Umayi, he describes how, after many years, or ‘one morning one April and one year before the year 2000’ (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 164), five officials come by and ask for Iin’s name. They are confused about all her identities and leave her with an official interpretive guide to the Pancasila. Three days later, they release her. There is just one condition: that she contacts her other alter egos and continues the giant Disneyland project (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 164–166). This leads to a moral dilemma for Iin, who (like the Indonesian nation) will again have to reinvent herself: … she would certainly have to go to Singapore again to the plastic surgery clinic … discussions with the World Bank and other agencies in the guise of … But if she didn’t … that would be sure to endanger Brother Brojol who no agency yet knew was her twin brother, for sure he would get turned into a second degree sacrificial victim, as a result of being related to an ex-leader of Lekra and Gerwani … oh even if Brojol had only played around … and he always came home with dirty clothes … and it was Iin who had to … launder his dirty clothes … Iin wasn’t a revenge-taker like most people of the archipelago … She was Pertiwi … Goddess Pertiwi that is. (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 166–167)

152

P. STOLTZ

In other words, in this quote, Mangunwijaya again demonstrates his feminist ideas by continuing to remind readers that gendered power relations are intersectional and can lead to different types of inequalities. In addition, his description of Iin as a former member of Gerwani emphasizes that, after years of detention, slander and discrimination, she remains a good citizen (compared to Ibu Pertiwi and Ibuism). After all, she is a Goddess. Mangunwijaya also puts forward cosmopolitan ideas in the novel, given his approach to global ethics and human rights. He describes how Pertiwi’s way out of the moral dilemma is to decide that she wants to put everything right for her brother Brojol, despite their quarrels about gender inequalities. This unfortunately provokes a second dilemma, which is political and economic, and which again challenges her to move beyond the binaries of good and evil. If she is going to restore the land destroyed for the project and economically compensate all the affected parties, then the political question becomes: will the authorities permit it? I argue that interdependence and global entanglements are important if we want to understand how structural inequalities, marginalizations and social vulnerabilities emerge in legal, political and cultural instruments and transitional justice measures during post-conflict transformations. If we want to address the political and moral dilemmas that influence national identities and nation-building, then we need to move beyond binaries. Mangunwijaya expresses this need in Durga/Umayi as follows: … was it always going to be like this, playing Durga in … Lebanon in Iraq in Cambodia but in her own country too, spreading a feast of death … dealing in guns, cocaine and women of ill repute, that is women of her own kind? Ah the mysteries of virtue! The mysteries of evil! If Goddess Durga and Lady Umayi were one and the same, was Iin fated to live a life full of doubles full of dilemmas full of conflicts full of contradictions without a break for the rest of her life, and why and what for and to what end? Hadn’t there been a breakthrough, hadn’t there resounded a Proclamation of Independence freedom redemption rescue from some quarter or other? To do away with this distressing dualism? (Mangunwijaya, 2004, p. 168)

One of the main arguments that I have made in this chapter is that, if we want to move beyond binaries in our re-imagining of national identity and nation-building in transitional justice thinking, then insights from critical genocide studies, feminist transitional justice and queer scholarship suggest that we must pay attention to notions of democracy, justice and

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

153

equality. I also recognize this in the novel. For Mangunwijaya, the solution to the dilemmas around moral and political responsibility lies in a democratic future characterized by dialogue between people and political elites, empathy and respect between groups with opposing perspectives, experiences and opinions, and by the pursuit of global justice and equality. All the characters in the novel relate to Iin and all of them struggle with moral dilemmas, making good and bad decisions about how to deal with the memories of the past. However—and here I appreciate Mangunwijaya’s novel especially—women are not necessarily victims while men are perpetrators; Indonesians are not necessarily victims while foreigners are perpetrators; Communists are not necessarily good and military elites evil. There are no entirely good or evil characters, because this would hinder us from imagining a just and equal future. This hope for a democratic future is most evident in the theme of the Microphone of the Proclamation. And so the novel ends: … and oh Lord good God … just then arrived … after so many dozens of years of being away … hearing news reviews about the behavior of Ms Durga getting the better of Umayi … the Microphone of 56 East Pegangsaan Street … forgive, forgive your errant traveler, stroke my cheeks wet with tears … speak command instruct … (Mangunwijaya, 2004, pp. 168–169)

6.6

Anti-communism and Political Homophobia

The combination of feminist transitional justice, critical genocide studies and queer theory is useful when we want to consider silences and denials about genocide. Such an approach enables a focus on how low-intensity violence might not only emerge or persist but also imply the constant risk of escalation or of targeting a relatively new group. This is also a useful focus if we want to avoid the reinforcement of structural dimensions of marginalization in transitional justice. In Durga/Umayi, Mangunwijaya resisted the hegemonic narrative of Indonesia about the role of the New Order regime during the genocide of 1965 and the silences about intersectional inequalities and social vulnerabilities. I have focused on issues of gender, class and Communism, but not on other issues that he mentions in the novel, such as the position of the Chinese ethnic minority group in Indonesian society or of Islam and other forms of religion. It is noteworthy in the context of a

154

P. STOLTZ

queer approach to transitional justice that Mangunwijaya only addressed heterosexuality in Durga/Umayi. The novel thus reflects an often-seen blind spot on LGBTQ people’s full citizenship, which becomes increasingly unfortunate, especially in relation to contemporary Indonesia. Let me briefly explain why. The transformation that forced an end to the era of the New Order in 1998 turned into a reform era [Era Reformasi], and Indonesia gained a well-earned reputation as the region’s most vibrant democracy. Unfortunately, observers have recently warned that this democracy is under threat, showing signs of fragility and even regression. Professor of Asian Law, Tim Lindsey, notes, for example, that most Indonesian civil society champions agree that the Reformasi ended sometime during the latter part of the first decade of this century. Despite this, a new label to define its replacement has not yet emerged, reflecting a deep uncertainty about recent social and political change and where the country is heading (Lindsey, 2018). Other observers have signalled persistent anti-Communist sentiments and intersectional inequalities relating to gender and sexuality (McGregor, Melvin, & Pohlman, 2018; Miller, 2018; Vann, 2019; Wieringa & Katjasungkana, 2019). Importantly, previously minor problems with political homophobia are today increasing and are characterized by ‘an unprecedented series of “anti-LGBT” statements and actions by some Indonesian government officials, politicians, and social organizations’ (Boellstorff, 2016, p. 1; see also Khanis, 2013; Platt et al., 2018; Ridwan & Wu, 2018). Boellstorff has pointed out that Indonesia is often characterized as being ‘tolerant’ of homosexuality. According to him, although this is a false belief, it does contain a grain of truth, because Indonesia has previously been marked by a predominance of heterosexism over homophobia. On the surface, therefore, Indonesia seems tolerant of homosexuality, and violence against LGBT Indonesians in the public sphere has been relatively rare. Building on Suryakusuma’s suggestion of the term State Ibuism, Boellstorff has suggested the term State Straightism as an ideology that defines Indonesians as heterosexual and normatively gendered, and thus excludes LGBT Indonesians from national belonging, despite their formal citizenship. Political homophobia, in turn, identifies cases where State Straightism transforms into homophobia directed at LGBT activists. It adds violence to what had been laws and policies, and anger and disgust to what had been belief and ideology (Boellstorff, 2004, 2016).

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

155

Changes in the balance between political heterosexism and political homophobia underlines two points made earlier. Firstly, the importance of paying attention to changing answers to questions about ‘who’ is vulnerable to violence, ‘when’ and ‘how’ in transitional justice instruments and mechanisms. Secondly, it also emphasizes the relevance of using a broad understanding of gender and sexuality in transitional justice thinking, including queer, LGBT, masculinity and intersectional approaches (see, e.g., Langlois, 2018). Building on these points, in the next chapter, I stress the importance of an intersectional approach in order to avoid universalizing the categories of victims, perpetrators and observers. I develop the complexities of the notion of denial in order to avoid the universalizing of emotions and feelings at either individual or collective levels. I argue that we can strengthen the triad model of victim, perpetrator and the often marginalized category of observer in the study of transitional justice and memory politics by paying more attention to thinking on transnational affective relations (Pedwell, 2014; Hemmings, 2012).

References Altınay, A. G., & Pet˝ o, A. (2015a). Europe and the century of genocides: New directions in the feminist theorizing of genocide. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 22(4), 379–385. Altınay, A. G., & Pet˝ o, A. (2015b). Gender, memory and connective genocide scholarship: A conversation with Marianne Hirsch. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 22(4), 386–396. An-Na‘im, A. A. (2013). Editorial note: From the neocolonial ‘transitional’ to indigenous formations of justice. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 7 (2), 197–204. Björkdahl, A., & Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2017). Gender and transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 69–90). London: Routledge. Boellstorff, T. (2004). The emergence of political homophobia in Indonesia: Masculinity and national belonging. Ethnos, 69(4), 465–486. Boellstorff, T. (2016). Against state straightism: Five principles for including LGBT Indonesians. E-International Relations. http://www.e-ir.info/ 2016/03/21/against-state-straightism-five-principles-for-including-lgbtindonesians/. Accessed 26 August 2019. Buckley-Zistel, S., Koloma Beck, T., Braun, C., & Mieth, F. (Eds.). (2014). Transitional justice theories. New York: Routledge.

156

P. STOLTZ

Buckley-Zistel, S., & Stanley, R. (2012). Gender in transitional justice. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cohen, S., & Husain, E. (2008). States of denial and the secular state. RSA Journal, 154(5534), 48–49. Feierstein, D. (2014). Beyond the binary model: National security doctrine in Argentina as a way of rethinking genocide as a social practice. In A. L. Hinton, T. La Pointe, & D. Irvin-Erickson (Eds.), Hidden genocides: Power, knowledge, memory (pp. 68–80). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. Heryanto, A. (2006). State terrorism and political identity in Indonesia: Fatally belonging. London: Routledge. Hinton, A. L. (2012). Critical genocide studies. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 7 (1), 4–15. Irvin-Erickson, D., La Pointe, T., & Hinton, A. L. (2014). Introduction: Hidden genocides: Power, knowledge, memory. In A. L. Hinton, T. La Pointe, & D. Irvin-Erickson (Eds.), Hidden genocides: Power, knowledge, memory (pp. 1–18). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jacob, F. (2019). Genocide and mass violence in Asia: An introduction. In F. Jacob (Ed.), Genocide and mass violence in Asia: An introductory reader (pp. 1–12). Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter. Kammen, D., & McGregor, K. (Eds.). (2012). The contours of mass violence in Indonesia, 1965–68. Singapore: NUS Press. Khanis, S. (2013). Human rights and the LGBTI movement in Indonesia. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 19(1), 127–138. Langlois, L. L. (2018). Gender perspective in UN framework for peace processes and transitional justice: The need for a clearer and more inclusive notion of Gender. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 12(1), 146–167. Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lindsey, T. (2018). Post-reformasi Indonesia: The age of uncertainty. Indonesia at Melbourne. https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/post-reformasiindonesia-the-age-of-uncertainty/. Accessed 5 September 2019. Lis, M. (2018). The history of loss and the loss of history: Papermoon Puppet Theatre examines the legacies of the 1965 violence in Indonesia. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 253–268). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

6

NARRATING THE NATION AND QUEERING TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE

157

Lugano, G. (2017). Counter-shaming the International Criminal Court’s intervention as neocolonial: Lessons from Kenya. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 11(1), 9–29. McGregor, K., Melvin, J., & Pohlman, A. (Eds.). (2018). The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Melvin, J., & Pohlman, A. (2018). A case for genocide: Indonesia, 1965–1966. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 27–47). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Mihr, A. (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 1–28). London: Routledge. Miller, S. (2018). Zombie anti-communism? Democratization and the demons of Suharto-era politics in contemporary Indonesia. In K. McGregor, J. Melvin, & A. Pohlman (Eds.), The Indonesian genocide of 1965: Causes, dynamics and legacies (pp. 287–310). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Otto, D. (Ed.). (2018). Queering international law: Possibilities, alliances, complications, risks. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Pedwell, C. (2014). Affective relations: The transnational politics of empathy. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Platt, M., Davies, S. G., & Bennett, L. R. (2018). Contestations of gender, sexuality and morality in contemporary Indonesia. Asian Studies Review, 42(1), 1–15. Poplawska, M. (2004). Wayang Wahyu as an example of Christian forms of shadow theatre. Asian Theatre Journal, 21(2), 194–202. Richter-Montpetit, M. (2018). Everything you always wanted to know about sex (in IR) but were afraid to ask: The ‘queer turn’ in international relations. Millennium, 46(2), 220–240. Richter-Montpetit, M., & Weber, C. (2017). Queer international relations. In Oxford research encyclopedia of politics (pp. 1–40). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridwan, R., & Wu, J. (2018). ‘Being young and LGBT, what could be worse?’ Analysis of youth LGBT activism in Indonesia: Challenges and ways forward. Gender & Development, 26(1), 121–138. Rooney, E., & Ní Aoláin, F. (2018). Transitional justice from the margins: Intersections of identities, power and human rights. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 12(1), 1–8. Shenhav, S. R. (2015). Analyzing social narratives. London: Routledge. Simic, O. (Ed.). (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. London: Routledge.

158

P. STOLTZ

Suryakusuma, J. I. (1996). The state and sexuality in New Order Indonesia. In L. Sears (Ed.), Fantasizing the feminine in Indonesia (pp. 92–119). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vann, M. (2019). Murder, museums, and memory: Cold War public history in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, and Phnom Penh. In F. Jacob (Ed.), Genocide and mass violence in Asia: An introductory reader (pp. 189–218). Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter. Von Joeden-Forgery, E. (2012). Gender and the future of genocide studies and prevention. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 7 (1), 89–107. Waites, M. (2017). Genocide and global queer politics. Journal of Genocide Research, 20(1), 44–67. Wieringa, S. E. (2002). Sexual politics in Indonesia. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wieringa, S. E. (2003). The birth of the new order state in Indonesia: Sexual politics and nationalism. Journal of Women’s History, 15(1), 70–91, 240. Wieringa, S. E., & Katjasungkana, N. (2019). Propaganda and the genocide in Indonesia: Imagined evil. London: Routledge. Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. (2002). Methodological nationalism and beyond: Nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. Global Network, 2(4), 301–334. Yusuf, H. O. (2018). Colonialism and the dilemmas of transitional justice in Nigeria. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 12(2), 257–276. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging: Intersectional contestations. London: Sage.

Report Final Report IPT 1965. (2017). Final Report of the International People’s Tribunal on Crimes Against Humanity in Indonesia 1965. The Hague, Jakarta: IPT 1965 Foundation.

Novels Hunter, T. M. (1991). Introduction to the 1991 edition. Y.B. Mangunwijaya, The Weaverbirds. Jakarta: Lontar (Indonesian original, 1981; English translation, 1991. Revised second edition, 2014). Keeler, W. (2004). Translator’s introduction. Y. B. Mangunwijaya, Durga/Umayi (2004; Indonesian original, 1991). Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Singapore University Press. Mangunwijaya, Y. B. (1991). Durga/Umayi. Jakarta: Grafiti. Mangunwijaya, Y. B. (2004; Indonesian original, 1991). Durga/Umayi. Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Singapore University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Denial, Hope and Transnational Affective Relations

(Paris, May 1968; Dimas Suryo, journalist, political dissident and Indonesian refugee in France.) For Vivienne and her equally agitated friends … the futility of the Vietnam conflict served as tinder for the anti-government protest movements that had begun to erupt in Europe and the United States. They wouldn’t have heard the names of Indonesia’s political activists who long predated theirs … what could they possibly know about the bloodbath that had taken place in Indonesia in the months and years that followed the events of September 30, 1965? Most of the people I had met, Vivienne included, would probably have had to open an atlas just to find out where Indonesia was. (Chudori, 2015/2012, pp. 8–9)

It can appear astonishing that—in admittedly very generalizing terms— ‘the whole world’ seems to have been watching while atrocities were perpetrated in Indonesia in 1965 and ‘nobody’ seems to have cared. Over time, those national and relatively few transnational memory activists who have protested against the denials of responsibility by relevant actors, have received little attention within the global public sphere. They have not gained any large transnational following of engaged and organized mobilizations across the world consisting of people who objected to what had happened (see especially Chapter 3). We can compare this observation to the reactions to events and memories of the war in Vietnam, which took place at more or less the same time. These events provoked reactions by large numbers of people globally, including during the student uprisings in France in 1968, to which I refer in the quote above. © The Author(s) 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7_7

159

160

P. STOLTZ

The novel Home [Pulang ] by Leila S. Chudori (2012; English translation, 2015), from which the quote is taken, starts in Jakarta in 1968 with the capture of another character, the journalist Hananto Prawiro, by the military. He has been in hiding for three years and in 1968 his wife and children are in detention. Together with his colleagues at the Nusantara News Agency, he had provided a critical voice in the complex political climate of the time, but in 1965, his colleagues had managed to flee to Paris, whereas Hananto had decided to remain with his family (Chudori, 2015, pp. III–VIII). In Paris, during the student uprisings of May 1968, one of these colleagues, Dimas Suryo, meets his future wife, Vivienne, for the first time (Chudori, 2015, pp. 2–3). However, as the quote suggests, Vivienne knew little about the events of 1965 in Indonesia. Hananto in turn, disappears after his capture. The war in Vietnam and the related protests gained worldwide media attention. The Vietnam mobilization in France remained weak, but the global mobilizations did pressure national and international actors to behave responsibly and be accountable for their actions (see, for example, Molden [2010] on the relation between global mobilizations protesting the war in Vietnam and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s argument about the universality of genocide during the Russell Commission of 1966). Regardless of the effects of these mobilizations, a comparison between the reactions to events in Vietnam and Indonesia highlights the point that the degree of empathy and affect that communities show in transnational space can differ quite substantially. The result of this difference in the case of Indonesia is that denials of moral and political responsibility continue despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice. Unfortunately, as memory scholar Wulf Kansteiner recently pointed out, there are no guarantees about how communities will react, how they create or use cosmopolitan memory or how they implement cosmopolitan thought. We can note this in relation to political debates about what is required in places of conflict as well as in relation to the accommodation of refugees (Kansteiner, 2019). Within transitional justice, this observation has led to attempts to provide increasingly holistic approaches to norms, discourses and measures, as well as to the study of transitional justice (see, for example, Gready & Robins, 2014). Since the beginning of this century, researchers in international relations have increasingly focused on how emotions and affect matter to Security Studies (Åhäll & Gregory, 2013; Crawford, 2000; Edkins,

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

161

2003). Hutchison has pointed out that, in particular circumstances, traumatic events and histories ‘snowball ’ into collective forms of meaning and feeling that distinguish a community as what Hutchison calls an ‘affective community’ (Hutchison, 2016, 2019). Under other circumstances, this does not happen. The presence of affective communities is an important premise for human rights struggles and transnational solidarity. Global norms for appropriate behaviour after violent conflicts work, at least at some level, on the assumption that, as global citizens, we care for each other. In her study of the transnational politics of empathy, Pedwell investigates how feminist and anti-racist visions of transnational social justice are based upon presumptions of notions of empathy, care and obligation (Pedwell, 2014, p. 2). Feminist thinking on affect that pays attention to the creation of affective solidarities highlights the role of affective dissonance in the creation of these solidarities (Hemmings, 2012). I find affective dissonance a very useful notion in cases of silence and denial, such as in my study of the transnational memories of the violent conflicts in Indonesia. In this final chapter, I suggest that the solution to the political puzzle posed in this study—why the silences and denials relating to the memories of violent conflicts in Indonesia continue, despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice—requires that we pay attention to the emotions of observers as well as victims and perpetrators. I argue that we can strengthen the triad model of victim, perpetrator and the oftenmarginalized category of observer in the study of transitional justice and memory politics by paying more attention to thinking on transnational affective relations (Hemmings, 2012; Pedwell, 2014). This includes the ways in which feelings of nostalgia can lead to denial (Cohen, 2001), ‘white innocence’ (Wekker, 2016) and colonial aphasia (Stoler, 2011) and the reinforcement of intersectional inequalities and historical injustices, whereas related feelings of shame, outrage and hope can lead to (transnational) memory activism in the pursuit of equality and social justice (Rigney, 2018). I illustrate the argument with examples from the Indonesian novel Pulang [Home] by Leila S. Chudori (2012; I use the English translation published in 2015).

162

P. STOLTZ

7.1 Implicated Subjects, Denials and Affective Dissonance Based on Hannah Arendt’s work on collective responsibility, Rothberg recently suggested that we lack adequate concepts for describing ‘the manifold indirect, structural, and collective forms of agency that enable injury, exploitation, and domination but that frequently remain in the shadows’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). In addition to the often rather weak triadic model of victim, perpetrator and bystander, he suggests that we should use the category of the implicated subject . Moving beyond idealized myths about innocent and uninvolved bystanders, he defines implicated subjects as those who ‘… occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). He works from the starting point that categories such as perpetrator, victim and implicated subject are abstractions that only serve analytical purposes, but that of course these do not describe human essences. Rather, they are positions ‘that we occupy in particular, dynamic, and at times clashing structures and histories of power; it is not an ontological identity that freezes us forever in proximity to power and privilege’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 8). This explanation of the three positions is in line with my argument in previous chapters, that there are limits to the uses of binaries in research on violent conflicts, genocides and post-conflict transformations. Just as bystanders are not necessarily innocent, so for example not all women are victims or all men perpetrators. In order to capture the coexistence of different relations to past and present injustices – based on the observation that, in other contexts, we might also or instead be perpetrators, victims or descendants of victims— Rothberg suggests the notion of complex implication. Forms of implication are difficult to grasp, he argues. Denial can render them obscure, and implicated subjects might not even be aware that they are implicated (Rothberg, 2019, p. 8). I agree with Rothberg’s ambition to find a better vocabulary for the triad model of victims, perpetrators and bystanders, as my attempts in previous chapters will attest. I also agree that denial can render forms of implication obscure and that there is a need to emphasize the importance of privilege and who benefits from domination in the politics of memory.

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

163

However, I suggest that the notion of ‘complex implication’ is Rothberg’s attempt to address what feminist scholars have already, for a long time and quite fruitfully, referred to as an intersectional approach (Cho, Crenshaw & McCall, 2013; Christensen & Qvotrup Jensen, 2014; Crenshaw, 1989; Hancock, 2016; Hill Collins, 2015; Yuval-Davis, 2011). In this study, I have shown how power relations according to gender, ‘race’, class, generation, sexuality and related categories can produce inequalities and injustices in intersecting ways. These can move across time, place and space, thereby influencing the identities and agencies of both victims and perpetrators, as well as observers. Consequently, I have suggested that intersectional, along with related masculinity and queer, approaches are useful if we want to analyse social inequalities and historical and contemporary injustices in transnational memories of violent conflicts. The findings of such analyses are important, I argue, because they can inform our thinking on normative strategies to obtain a just and equal future; for example, in the context of transitional justice. From my use of intersectional, masculinity and queer approaches, it follows that I agree with Rothberg that privilege means implicated subjects are a problem. Having said that, Rothberg links the analysis of what I call intersectional inequalities and historical injustices to the normative political argument that we need to rethink historical and political responsibility as implication because there is a need to hold implicated subjects accountable in both moral and political registers (Rothberg, 2019, p. 200). I would like to place this argument in the context of my broader discussion about global norms of transitional justice. This is because, although I agree with Rothberg’s focus on political and moral responsibility and have used it quite a lot myself in this study, I also find this focus to be somewhat limited in scope. Transitional justice research has had problems formulating theories that can capture the norms and aims of transitional justice in ways that would be universally applicable and acceptable (Gready & Robins, 2014). Not only notions and aims of responsibility and accountability, such as those suggested by Rothberg, but also recognition, reconciliation, civic trust and democracy can be relevant in this context (de Greiff, 2012). Regardless of how these aims are formulated, policy measures that relate to these norms and aims can be contradictory. The aim of truth-finding in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions can require amnesty for perpetrators, who would otherwise not come forward. This amnesty might in turn not achieve the aims of civic trust or democracy. I can say the same of

164

P. STOLTZ

the prosecution of perpetrators at regional human rights courts or at the International Criminal Court, which could, but not necessarily, achieve such aims. Tensions between individual and collective memories, as well as between personal and social narratives, are important here, because personal responsibility and feelings of trust and reconciliation are linked to political responsibility, democratic processes and feelings of social trust and reconciliation. Therefore, I find that Rothberg’s suggestion of a link between implication, responsibility and accountability is only one way of thinking about transitional justice. I defined transitional justice earlier as: ‘a concept and a process that encompasses a number of different legal, political and cultural instruments and mechanisms that can strengthen, weaken, enhance or accelerate processes of regime change and consolidation’ (Mihr, 2017, p. 1). When I focused on denials of political responsibility in Chapter 3, I used the norm translation approach developed by Zwingel (2016), which enabled me to analyse strategies for translating, appropriating, contesting and resisting global norms of transitional justice. This approach was thus sensitive to the ways in which norms (as a standard of appropriate behaviour for actors with a given identity) strengthen, weaken, enhance or accelerate processes of transitional justice. It enabled a nuanced description of the dynamics of political responsibility and accountability, but it also stimulated thinking on a broader range of alternative norms, aims and strategies to obtain justice and equality in the future. One of the main arguments in this study is my suggestion that we need to focus not only on denial, but also on resistances to denial, in order to make informed decisions about the future. Where and why do resistances emerge and what hinders their success? Similar to my argument in Chapter 4 that the relations between gender, silence, voice and agency are more complex than they might seem on the surface, this means that in this chapter I will argue that we also need to be able to grasp the complexities of the notion of denial if we want to understand the gendered resistances to denial. Although denial is easier to understand as an individual psychological mechanism, it is also a collective mechanism and, as we have seen throughout this study, it is possible for whole societies to slip into denial. The term ‘states of denial’ introduced by Cohen consequently refers both to ‘internal psychic states’ and to the ‘states’ of organized governments or nations (Cohen & Husain, 2008). Denial can be personal, official or

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

165

cultural, he argues. It can also be historical or contemporary and, importantly, can involve actors who are victims, perpetrators or observers. Space and place also matter in denial, according to Cohen, in such things as ideas about our responsibility for strangers and for those close to us (Cohen, 2001, pp. 9–20). Cohen uses the category of ‘observers’ to incorporate three types of audiences to atrocities: (1) Internal audiences, who are actual witnesses to atrocities or hear about them immediately from first-hand sources (this is especially recognizable in Chapters 4 and 5); (2) External audiences, who receive information from secondary sources such as mass media or humanitarian organizations (see Chapter 6 and this chapter); and (3) bystander states, such as other governments or international organizations (see especially Chapter 3) (Cohen, 2001, pp. 14–15). What is perhaps most interesting is that Cohen distinguishes between different possibilities of what victims, perpetrators or observers deny: literal denial refers to the denial of a fact or knowledge of a fact. Interpretive denial refers to the denial of a specific interpretation of a fact. Implicatory denial refers to the denial of the psychological, political or moral implications that conventionally follow facts and the conventional interpretation of facts (Cohen, 2001, pp. 7–9). Inaction, or the failure to take steps in response to knowledge, is a fourth kind of denial. Cohen calls this a refusal to care, or post-moral denial (Cohen & Husain, 2008). These different aspects of denial are central to this study in that they are useful for understanding the tensions between individual and collective narratives and provide an opportunity to focus on categories of victims and perpetrators as well as bystanders and observers. If we want to understand the denials of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and observers, as well as the resistances and collective actions against such denials, from a transnational perspective, then approaches to transnational affective relations become useful (Pedwell, 2014). Research about ‘affect’ often describes the notion as something that is nonconscious, non-subjective or pre-personal. This is in contrast to ‘feelings’, which are often identified as personal, and conscious, emotional experiences (Åhäll, 2019, p. 154), usually understood as fluid, fleeting and hard to control (Pedwell, 2017, p. 149). It is sometimes useful to make contingent analytical distinctions between ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’, but this does not mean that they are discrete entities. For instance, we can refer to emerging and shifting intensities as ‘affect’ instead of ‘emotions’

166

P. STOLTZ

as something discrete, but embodied sensations are always intertwined in complex ways (Pedwell, 2017, pp. 149–150). Consequently, Pedwell uses the term ‘affective relations’ to emphasize the relational nature of emotions (Pedwell, 2017, pp. 17–18). Hutchison, in turn, argues that under particular circumstances traumatic events can turn into collective forms of meaning and feeling and distinguish a community as a so-called ‘affective community’ (Hutchison, 2016, 2019). One suggestion for what is required for organized resistance, affective solidarity and affective communities to emerge is what Hemmings calls affective dissonance. She understands affective dissonance as ‘the judgment arising from the distinction between experience and the world’ (Hemmings, 2012, p. 157). Building on this thought about transnational affective relations, affective communities and affective dissonance, I suggest that we need to pay closer attention in our thinking on memory politics and transitional justice to feelings, emotions and affect that can lead to denial, which in turn can lead to the reinforcement of intersectional inequalities and historical injustices. We also need to pay closer attention to senses of affective dissonance that can lead to feelings of outrage and hope and the desire to resist and rectify such denials (on memories as carriers of hope, see, for example, Rigney, 2018). That is, we need to focus on both denial and the feelings and emotions that, from such a position, lead to resistance and/or in/activism and hope and the feelings and emotions that, from this position, lead to resistance and activism. This includes how these different positions relate to each other. Similarly to previous chapters, the argument in this final chapter develops as follows. Under the next sub-heading, I will describe the novel that I use to illustrate my argument (here Home [Pulang ] by Leila S. Chudori). Based on my three research questions, I will continue by first arguing for the importance of focusing not only on victims and perpetrators but also on observers in the study of memory politics and transitional justice. Using the theories of implication and implicated subjects developed by Rothberg (2019), I argue for the importance of an intersectional approach in order to avoid universalizing the categories of victims, perpetrators and observers. Next, I develop the complexities of the notion of denial, including the denial of political and moral responsibility, in order to avoid the universalizing of emotions and feelings on either individual or collective levels (Cohen, 2001; Cohen & Husain, 2008). I develop this argument further in the last part of the chapter, when I use Hemmings’

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

167

ideas about affective dissonance (Hemmings, 2012) in order to discuss gender and resistance to denials in transnational affective relations (Pedwell, 2014; see also Rigney, 2018). Finally, I address how the results are relevant in transitional justice research, discourses, norms, measures and strategies and in research on the politics of memory and activism.

7.2

Home

Leila S. Chudori is a journalist for the renowned Indonesian news magazine Tempo. She is also a writer of short stories and a television series. In 2012, it was fifteen years since the fall of the authoritarian regime and the opportunities to challenge the official state-sponsored version of Indonesia’s history had improved. This was also the year that Chudori published her first novel, Pulang [English translation, 2015, entitled Home], for which she received the 2012 Khatulistiwa Literary Award (Indonesia’s most prestigious literary prize, which in 2014 changed its name to the Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa Award). Chudori based Home on six years of research and interviews with political exiles from the military regime of President Suharto in Paris, France, and former political prisoners in Jakarta. In Paris, she interviewed, amongst others, the late Umar Said, the late Sobron Aidit and Kusni Sulang, who revealed their life stories and how they ended up starting Indonesia Restaurant on the Rue de Vaugirard in 1982. In Jakarta, interviewees included her colleague at Tempo, the journalist Amarzan Loebis, as well as activist Djoko Sri Moeljono (Chudori, 2015, pp. 491–492). Home is a metaphor for things that many people desire and appreciate. The characters in Home also want to feel they belong at home. They have experiences from home. They can feel a nostalgic yearning for a time and a place called home. This means that the notion of home comprises both time and place and we can relate ‘home’ to a politics of belonging (YuvalDavis, 2011). Feelings of home and belonging also work at local, national and transnational levels as an emotional and mobilizing metaphor. This emotional and mobilizing aspect is perhaps especially present when people do not feel at home, or when there is a dissonance with what others around them consider normal. The novel describes such feelings with the help of a variety of characters, similar to the feelings of other characters described in the novels in previous chapters. The novel is mainly set in 1965, 1968 and especially 1998, and is told from the perspectives of different characters who are located in and

168

P. STOLTZ

move between Jakarta and Paris. One of the main characters is Dimas Suryo, a journalist who had travelled as a political dissident and refugee to Paris, in connection with the mass violence and imprisonments of 1965. Dimas was a friend of members of the PKI, but he was not a Communist himself. Together with his colleague, Nug, from the Nusantara News Agency, where they worked, he was sent in 1965 to the annual conference of the International Organization of Journalists in Santiago, Chile, and to Havana, Cuba, where their other colleague, Risjaf, was representing Indonesia at the Asia-Africa Organization. Afterwards, the three went to Beijing, China, for the Asia-Africa Journalists’ Conference. After some time in China, they came to Europe (Chudori, 2015, pp. 40–43). In the meantime, the army had closed down the Nusantara News Agency, detained the editor-in-chief and a number of other agency employees, due to Communist activities, and interrogated others (Chudori, 2015, p. 408). The editor of the foreign desk, Hananto Prawiro, had gone into hiding, before he was captured by the military in 1968 (Chudori, 2015, pp. 8–9) and disappeared. Eventually, the military released his wife, Surti Anandari, and their children from detention. Dimas and his friends were worried about Hananto. Their relatives warned them to keep away from Indonesia out of fear that the military would also capture them and make them disappear. They had never been able to return to Indonesia. In Paris, they worked at their own Indonesian restaurant called Tanah Air Restaurant. Another major character is the daughter of Dimas and his French wife, Vivienne Devereaux, the film student Lintang Utara Suryo. Dimas and Vivienne met during the student uprisings at the Sorbonne in 1968. Thirty years later, they are divorced and their daughter Lintang is curious about the silences surrounding her father’s past. Encouraged by her film professor at the university, she decides that the final assignment for her studies will be a documentary film in Jakarta about the violence and the victims of 30 September 1965, and the impact of these events on victims’ families. The visit to Jakarta brings her in touch with her own relatives as well as with the relatives of her father’s Indonesian friends in Paris. The timing of her visit coincides with the student uprisings, which result in the overthrow of President Suharto. Home covers the whole New Order period, but given the date of publication, 2012, Chudori tells the narrative from the perspective of memories gathered at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This time perspective upon the novel (1965–1968–1998–2012) is interesting in light of

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

169

recent research by Rigney (2018) on the nexus between memory and activism. By this, she means the interplay between memory activism, the memory of activism and memory in activism. Memory activism, in Rigney’s schema, means how actors attempt to produce cultural memory and to steer future remembrance. This is what Lintang is attempting to do in the novel when she makes a documentary film about 1965. The memory of activism, in turn, concerns how earlier mobilizations for social change are culturally recollected. In other words, it captures the hegemonic narrative and the narrative struggles about the activisms relating to the New Order period in Indonesia. We can find one such narrative in the novel Home. Finally, memory in activism is about how the cultural memory of earlier social struggles and mobilizations informs new movements in the present. Here, we can think of the way in which Chudori reminds readers of Home about the student uprisings of 1968 and 1998 in Indonesia, France and across the world. As I stated earlier, the Indonesian political and social context of 2012, when Chudori published her novel, is a context during which the Reformasi period started to transform and previously achieved democratic progress started to lose ground. This means that some readers, such as myself, can use the novel as a way of considering how past mobilizations relate to the present time of reading and how they inform thinking about strategies for the future of Indonesian politics and society and the transnational activism that is related to this future. We can also think of the way in which Mangunwijaya in his novel Durga/Umayi, illustrated in the last chapter, reminded readers of the Indonesian revolution and the promise of the Declaration of Independence in order to stimulate thinking about the future of Indonesia during the late New Order period. Parallel to this observation by Rigney about the nexus between memory and activism, a complex temporal overlay is also recognizable in the novel. Chudori describes different periods and the different perspectives of victims, perpetrators and observers. Some characters are rich and privileged Indonesians in Paris or Jakarta, whereas others are poor, marginalized and discriminated against in these cities and countries. Some belong to a first generation of victims, perpetrators and observers, whereas others are latecomers and belong to a second generation. All of these characters have feelings and emotions, which may change over time or place. The feelings and emotions at the individual and collective levels relate to each other in transnational space and mean that the characters have senses of

170

P. STOLTZ

‘home’—as in the title of the novel—and of belonging; or that they do not feel at home or that they do not belong. At the end of the novel, Dimas dies in Paris after having been seriously ill for a long time. His family and friends from France and Indonesia bury him in June 1998 at Karet Cemetery in Jakarta. By then, the student uprisings had ended and President Suharto had resigned on 21 May 1998. Lintang describes it as though her father has come home ‘to finally reunite with the soil that he said had a different scent from the earth in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. The soil of Karet. The land he was destined to come home to’ (Chudori, 2015, p. 484). At the same time, Lintang has to make a decision about how to position herself in relation to her homes and loved ones in France and Indonesia. She misses her father in the making of this choice but, surrounded by everybody at the funeral, she thinks: ‘It would be much easier not to choose and to pretend there were no consequences. But, as you said, to choose requires courage; it is what one must do’ (Chudori, 2015, p. 485). Throughout the novel, an affective dissonance (Hemmings, 2012) has slowly emerged in the way in which Lintang understands the world around her and in the feelings that relate to that understanding. The politics of belonging in Indonesia are also about to change after May 1998. This provided people with new possibilities, similar to those of the characters in the novel Home, in relation to what I will later describe as affective citizenship (Parashar, 2018).

7.3

Victims, Perpetrators and Observers

Let me start by arguing for the importance of a strong use of the triad model of victims, perpetrators and observers, and for the importance of an intersectional approach in the study of these categories in transitional justice and the politics of memory. An intersectional approach helps us to avoid universalizing the ways in which power relations and inequalities matter for these categories. In order to illustrate my argument, I will use my first research question to retrieve examples from the novel Home and ask: who are the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in the narrative? Who are victims, perpetrators and observers? Do the characters reveal tensions between individual and collective identities, which could be the consequence of power relations within events and contexts in the past? Categories of victims and perpetrators are often easier to identify and use for analytical purposes than the categories of bystander or observer.

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

171

This is despite the suggestion that I have already made in Chapters 4, 5 and 6 that we need to be very careful about how we construct the binaries between these two categories if we want to address not only historical injustices, but also the intersectional inequalities that relate to them. After all, perpetrators may become victims, and observers may become either perpetrators or victims, and all three categories can belong to the same culture of denial (also Cohen, 2001, p. 14). Examples of victims in the novel are the characters of the journalist Hananto Prawiro and his wife Surti Anandari. The novel starts with a prologue, told from the perspective of Hananto, when the military captures him in 1968 after a three-year period in hiding (Chudori, 2015, pp. III–VIII). The military detained Hananto’s wife Surti Anandari and their three children in 1965. In 1998, Lintang films Surti for her documentary. On this occasion, Surti talks about her experiences as a victim of sexual violence and torture. Officers R and M had threatened her that the same would happen to their daughter Kenanga, and used Kenanga as a weapon to extract information from Surti about the whereabouts of Hananto (Chudori, 2015, pp. 406–414). This means that examples of perpetrators in the novel include Officers R and M. Another example is a former friend of Dimas, the writer Sumarno Biantoro. Sumarno’s plays were said to be ‘revolutionary’ before the fall of President Sukarno, but when he was subsequently imprisoned and tortured after September 1965, rumour had it that he had turned into an informer and had given the names of leftist and left-leaning persons. This had supposedly included the name of Hananto. Consequently, Dimas and his friends had given Sumarno the nickname ‘Snitch’. They were upset when he eventually turned up in Paris and contacted them, clearly already knowing everything there was to know about their current lives (Chudori, 2015, pp. 129–130). We can also find examples of bystanders in the novel, although this category is notoriously difficult to define. On the one hand, it seems logical to assume that bystanders are ‘passive’, as opposed to perpetrators, who do something, or victims, to whom things are being done. On the other hand, it can surprise us that ‘none’ of these bystanders reacted to the injustices relating to the genocide in Indonesia in 1965. A fundamental argument that Rothberg makes in his study on implicated subjects is that such things are possible ‘not because some restricted group of demonic

172

P. STOLTZ

individuals continues to perpetrate extreme evil, but because most people deny, look away from, or simply accept the benefits of evil in both its extreme and everyday forms’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 20). Still, Rothberg takes issue with this assumption of passivity and suggests that we should rather think about bystanders in terms of implication. By implication, he means entanglement, involvement or being closely connected, and he emphasizes that people he calls ‘implicated subjects’ have power and privilege, without themselves being direct agents of harm. In other words, they are not perpetrators, or for that matter victims. Rather, implicated subjects are ‘participants in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). They are not passive, because: ‘Although indirect or belated, their actions and inactions help produce and reproduce the positions of victims and perpetrators … [they] help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). One of the first characters whom we can identify as a bystander and implicated subject in Home is Vivienne, the French woman who later becomes the wife of Dimas. In the quote at the beginning of this chapter and at the beginning of the novel, we meet her at a point in time when her implication in what has happened in Indonesia is still not clear to her (Chudori, 2015, pp. 8–9). Since forms of implication are difficult to grasp, and denial can render them obscure, implicated subjects might not even be aware of their own implication, according to Rothberg (2019, p. 8) and Vivienne is, at this early stage of the story, a good example of that. Later on, she is more directly involved in the politics of memories of the past and more aware of her implication. The implication of Dimas’ and Vivienne’s daughter, Lintang, and Narayana, her French-Indonesian friend and lover, as a second example, is more complex. Their privilege and implication are not the same as those of Vivienne, since one of their parents is Indonesian. I find the thinking of Cohen useful to explain the similarities and differences between these examples. Cohen introduces the category of ‘observers’. He separates between three types of audiences to atrocities: internal and external audiences of observers, as well as what he calls ‘bystander states’. Internal audiences are those who are witnesses to atrocities or hear about them directly from first-hand sources, whereas external audiences have to rely on sources such

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

173

as the mass media. Bystander states consist of other states than the one in which the atrocity happens or, in other words, other governments, or the ‘international community’, which may stand by and watch while atrocities happen (Cohen, 2001, pp. 14–17). Following Cohen, I identify Lintang and Narayana as observers, who hear about atrocities from first-hand sources such as their parents and other Indonesian friends and relatives, especially in Paris. They thus belong to an internal audience of the atrocities. Subsequently, I identify Vivienne in relation to the category of observers as belonging to an external audience, because initially she hardly knows where Indonesia is on the map and has to rely on mass media and other sources to learn about what has happened. This distinction between internal and external audiences within the category of observer enables us to identify types of implication in clearer ways than what I suggest the category of implicated subject offers. Another, related, point I would like to make concerns the notion of ‘postmemory’. Hirsch has famously described ‘postmemory’ as ‘the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’ (Hirsch, 2008, p. 103; also Hirsch, 1997, 2012). However, together with Smith, Hirsch points out the importance of being sensitive to the differences that separate primary from secondary witnesses (Hirsch & Smith, 2002, p. 12). In other words, we should be sensitive to how the experiences of a first generation of victims, such as the previously mentioned Surti Anandari, wife of the disappeared journalist Hananto Prawiro, or of primary witnesses, such as Dimas, relate to the knowledge of the past of a second-generation character such as Lintang, Dimas’ daughter. It can be confusing to keep track of the ways in which research on implicated subjects, denial and postmemory define categories of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and observers. This is because most suggestions tend to be sensitive to the limits of the analytical purposes of the definitions. These purposes also depend, of course, upon the aim of the study in question. Initially, postmemory concerned a first generation of victims and a second generation of their children or other relatives, but eventually the definition of generation became a more symbolic way of describing witnesses. As Rothberg has pointed out, researchers generally do not use ‘postmemory’ to characterize the different experiences and memories of the descendants of perpetrators (Rothberg, 2019, p. 14). The question is:

174

P. STOLTZ

what are the advantages and disadvantages of this exclusion in the context of different studies, but also of the field of memory studies in general? It can be good to try to develop precise analytical tools so that we know what we are talking about when we define victims (to whom things are done), perpetrators (who do things) and observers (those who see and know what is happening), although we know that individuals may change roles (Cohen, 2001, p. 14). I would like to argue that it is sometimes good to be sensitive to differences within and between all three categories, especially when this relates to feelings, emotions and affective relations, since this enables us to get a better grip on the politics of memory, and provides us with a better opportunity to consider appropriate transitional justice measures and aims. We can see these differences within and between the categories in Home, where we meet the characters of a second generation, embodied in Lintang and her French-Indonesian lover Narayana in Paris, but also in the characters of Lintang’s cousin Rama and his girlfriend Rinanta, who both live in Jakarta. Whereas the positions of Lintang and Rama in relation to the memories of the atrocities of 1965 evolve over time, the position of the rich and privileged Rinanta in relation to these memories remains the same. This is partly due to how the personal feelings about ‘home’ and belonging of these four characters relate to what Yuval-Davis has called the politics of belonging. The use of an intersectional approach is vital for our understanding of such politics, according to Yuval-Davis, and in my view relates the politics of memory to those of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011). I will develop the positions of these characters further in the next section, but let me here emphasize that, in case we want to imagine strategies to obtain a just and equal future, it is not fruitful to essentialize the agencies or the affective relations of victims, perpetrators or observers of different generations. Rather, we can assume that there are variations in agency and emotions. Instead of assuming complex implications and privilege, as Rothberg does (see under Sect. 7.2), I suggest that an intersectional approach, such as that used throughout this study, enables us to analyse the intersections of power, privilege and inequalities in more subtle ways. For the category of observers, this can allow us to assume that observers also have dynamic reactions.

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

7.4

175

Knowledge and Denial

Forms of implication are difficult for bystanders to grasp, since denial can render them obscure (Rothberg, 2019, p. 8). I would like to develop this by arguing that victims, perpetrators and observers do not all deny in universalizing ways or in general react emotionally in the same way. Even when victims, perpetrators and bystanders are collective actors and not individuals, they can still change their minds and their behaviour. Relatedly, transnational space can influence affective relations and emphasize the dynamic character of individual and collective emotions (Pedwell, 2014). In this section, following Cohen, I want to show that denial can imply different things and relate to emotions (and subsequently to agency) in different ways (Cohen, 2001). I will present Cohen’s suggestion for how we can understand different forms of denial with the help of my research questions about time and place, and using examples from Home. These questions are: what do ‘we’ know about the past? and: how do ‘we’ know what we know about the past? To start with, denial can concern literal denial of facts or knowledge of facts (Cohen, 2001, pp. 7–9). One example of a lack of knowledge about the facts concerns what happened on 30 September 1965, or during the violent conflicts of the 1940s in Indonesia. As Cohen points out, people know about past or present social suffering in their own societies, from personal observation and experience, but information from faraway places requires access to coverage by the mass media or humanitarian organizations. If this is missing, then people can literally deny knowledge of the facts and they would be telling the truth in doing so (Cohen, 2001, pp. 18–20). Notions of time, place and (transnational) space can influence the agency of actors, as we could also see in Chapters 4 and 5. An example from Home can illustrate how not only external, but also internal, observers can literally deny knowledge of facts. When the character of Vivienne—an external observer who literally denied knowledge of anything that had happened in Indonesia—and the political dissident Dimas meet each other in 1968, she asks him to tell her about Indonesia. This puts him in a bit of a predicament: Where would I start? With my family? With the country in tumult? Or back to the early 1960s when President Sukarno’s shifting political alliances led the country – and me as well – to the point we are today. My mind flashed back to Jakarta. What had Sukarno been up to? Did he actually

176

P. STOLTZ

side with his friends on the left? What had he wanted or hoped to achieve with his policy of ‘Nasakom’, his odd promulgation of nationalism, religion, and communism? And as the chronology of the night of September 30 emerged, why had he fled the presidential palace and gone to Halim Perdanakusama Naval Air Base? This was a question that had nagged my friends in Jakarta and continued to nag me. (Chudori, 2015, p. 20)

For many years, observers have referred to ‘the events of 1965’ (Peristiwa 65) in vague terms, in order to express a lack of knowledge about the facts or what in transitional justice discourses is often referred to as a lack of knowledge about ‘the truth’ of what had happened on 30 September 1965 and its aftermath. The effects of this literal denial for Dimas and his friends have included feelings of frustration. Let me return to these feelings later and for now concentrate on a second form of denial. This concerns interpretive denial , or the denial of the interpretation of facts (Cohen, 2001, pp. 7–9). An example of such a denial is how actors interpret the facts of the murder of the generals on 30 September 1965. Over the decades, this interpretation has sparked quite a controversy. It involves the interpretations of victims, perpetrators and observers. I have already addressed this controversy in my discussion of Indonesian national identity and nation-building in Chapter 6. Let me here provide an example of how such a denial of the interpretation of facts relates to Rothberg’s description of implicated subjects, who ‘occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). In Home, Lintang attends a so-called ‘Kartini Day celebration’ at the Indonesian embassy in Paris, at the invitation of her French-Indonesian friend and lover, Narayana Lafebvre, who, according to her father, is a pretentious rich bourgeois kid (Chudori, 2015, p. 185). Kartini was an early Indonesian feminist, whom Indonesians celebrate every year, but Narayana points out to Lintang: ‘I bet you could count on one hand the number of Indonesians who have actually read From Darkness to Light. This is a ceremonial event, OK?’ (Chudori, 2015, p. 163). At the celebration party, Lintang overhears a number of men talking about her: ‘Who the devil brought her here?’ ‘What does it matter? She’s not her father.’ ‘But have you forgotten government policy?’

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

177

‘But that is for former political prisoners working as civil servants, or as teachers or journalists. What’s the big deal about her coming to a party?’ ‘It’s no big deal, but we did get that notice from Jakarta.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘That we’re not to frequent Tanah Air Restaurant; that all the people there are communists.’ (Chudori, 2015, p. 169)

These men are diplomats and, as such, representatives of the Indonesian state. They relate to the privileges and power that follow the benefits of belonging to a regime that was built on the atrocities of the late 1960s. One could perhaps suggest that they are perpetrators by implication. However, in their conversation, they relate to a specific statesponsored interpretation of the violent past. Indonesian state policies have codified one interpretation of the facts. They tell a strategic narrative that Communists are dangerous people, who should not work as civil servants, teachers or journalists. The interpretation of the facts about the murders of the generals in these policies is not that these facts are missing, but that the blame for these murders lies with the Communists. This means, for at least one of the speakers, that, as representatives of this state, they should therefore not socialize with Communists. Others disagree. This discloses a tension between personal and collective narratives. In other words, we can recognize interpretive denial being practised by the collective actor of the state of Indonesia, as well as positions of power and privilege amongst the individual speakers, but we need to further investigate the relation to harm, because there are different sentiments about this amongst the speakers. A third form of denial is implicatory denial , which concerns denial of the psychological, moral and political implication that usually follows facts and the common interpretation of these facts. Here, we can think of the denial of political and moral responsibilities of states as well as the denial of the psychological implication of individuals or societies. Cohen reminds us that every mode of denial has its own psychological status. Literal denial can be a genuine ignorance, or a deliberate aversion of the gaze, as we saw above. Interpretive denial can also range from an inability to grasp what facts mean to others to the cynical re-naming of facts to avoid legal accountability. Implicatory denials can concern banal techniques to avoid moral demands, but they are invoked with varying degrees of sincerity (Cohen, 2001, pp. 8–9).

178

P. STOLTZ

In Home, an example of implicatory denial by the Indonesian state is the Museum of the Treachery of the Indonesian Communist Party in Jakarta, which Lintang visits with her Indonesian lover, Segara Alam, who is the son of the disappeared Hananto and his wife Surti. This museum is located in the suburb Lubang Buaya, or The Crocodile’s Pit, close to where the generals were murdered. While visiting this museum, Lintang realizes that President Suharto’s New Order government sees the narrative that is told here as the basis for its authority. Interviewing the teachers and schoolchildren who are walking around the museum on their compulsory visit for history class, she learns that the dioramas at the museum are exactly like the scenes from the movie The Treachery of the September 30 Movement and the Communist Party. The teachers confirm what Alam has told her, that watching this film is also compulsory for children (Chudori, 2015, pp. 389–390). In other words, the Indonesian state denies moral or political responsibility for the events of 30 September 1965 and blames the murders on the Communists. A final form of denial is postmoral denial. Implicatory denial is about actors who accept that something has happened, but deny any implications that they should do something about it. Postmoral denial replaces this attempt to rationalize why actors did not do something by a refusal to care (Cohen & Husain, 2008). We could see this earlier in this study, when I introduced the notion of white innocence developed by Wekker (2016). Similarly, Stoler suggests the use of colonial aphasia. By this, I understand her to mean that what Rothberg later called ‘implication’ concerns not only loss of access but also an active dissociation. Rather than innocence, ignorance or absence, colonial aphasia is, according to Stoler, the blocking of knowledge, difficulty with generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things and difficulty comprehending what is uttered (Stoler, 2011, p. 125). Postmoral denial, following thoughts on white innocence and colonial aphasia, comes close to Rothberg’s suggestion that positions of power and privilege mean that implicated subjects are not themselves direct agents of harm. By refusing to care, implicated subjects ‘contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes’ (Rothberg, 2019, p. 1). This makes their privilege highly problematic. In Home, an example of postmoral denial is the reaction of Lintang’s cousin Rama’s girlfriend Rininta and her family, when they meet Lintang and her uncle Aji’s family for the first time. As Rama’s sister, Andini,

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

179

points out in the novel, Aji’s family is a so-called ‘E.T. family’. E.T. stands for Eks Topol, or former political prisoner. This means that they come from what the government calls an ‘unclean environment ’ and ‘…Even though Om Dimas was never arrested and never imprisoned either, his name is the same. He’s an E.T. too …’ (Chudori, 2015, p. 366). Consequently, Cousin Rama has had to erase his family history in order to avoid using the name Suryo so that he can pass the security clearance to land a job as an accountant (Chudori, 2015, p. 367). Rininta and her extremely wealthy family do not know about this categorization of Rama’s family and are quite shocked when they find out about it during their first meeting. They are uninterested in socializing with Communists and, for example, happen to tell Rama and his family that they had avoided visiting the famous Tanah Air Restaurant in Paris, when on a visit to Europe, for exactly that reason. This was before they became aware of who was in front of them (Chudori, 2015, pp. 374–383). Cohen argues that denial includes cognition, emotion, morality and action. He claims that, in the public arena of knowing about atrocities, action is the issue (Cohen, 2001, p. 9). I suggest that emotions—for example of not being disturbed—are important if we want to understand denial, but that denial can also lead to other actions. These actions can take different forms. Firstly, privilege and feelings of ignorance, nostalgia or aphasia can lead to postmoral denial and inaction. Secondly, they can lead to actions that result in the reinforcement of intersectional inequalities and historical injustices. More optimistically, interpretive denial can lead to hope and action for social change. The first can by exemplified in Home by means of the rich and privileged Rininta and her family, who display an example of postmoral denial. Rinanta’s eventual action is that she breaks off her relationship with Rama (Chudori, 2015, p. 442). This, in my interpretation, is in accordance with Rinanta and her family’s refusal to harbour feelings of care. The second returns me to my example of interpretive denial above, which concerned a discussion amongst diplomats who had different feelings about the interpretation of state policies relating to E.T.s. However, in the novel, the actions of three young Indonesian diplomats in Paris are eventually decisive for Lintang’s chances of obtaining a visa for Indonesia. Surprisingly, given government directions to do the opposite, the three had come to the Tanah Air Restaurant as friends of Narayana in order to advise her how to formulate an acceptable visa request that would allow her to enter and stay in Indonesia. When asked about their reason for helping,

180

P. STOLTZ

they explained that they were from a well-educated generation born after 1965. They could make up their own minds (Chudori, 2015, pp. 270– 281). Differently put, we need to be aware of the complexities of the notion of denial in order to avoid the universalizing of emotions and feelings at either the individual or collective levels. Observers may have experiences, feelings and emotions that lead them to become either perpetrators or victims, or for that matter activists. The same can be said of victims and perpetrators, who might also become activists.

7.5

Memory, Hope and Activism

In relation to memory studies, Rigney (2018) argues that there are signs that scholars are slowly beginning to move beyond victimhood as their central operative concept, and to focus more on perpetrators and ‘implicated subjects’. However, they continue to frame memory in terms of violence and trauma, or the absence of something bad, rather than the presence of something desirable, such as the feelings of hope that transnational activism can bring. In other words, she finds that there is a limited repertoire of tools to capture the mechanisms through which positivity is transmitted across time and space. Rigney therefore suggests the notion of hope and defines this as a civic virtue and as a minimum condition for democracy. Hope works on the premise that we do not know what will happen and, in that space, there is room to act. This means that she sees hope as a specific ‘structure of feeling’, which informs civic action in everyday resistance or revolutionary transformations (Rigney, 2018). In this study, I have attempted to solve the puzzle of why the silences and denials that relate to the memories of violent conflicts in Indonesia continue, despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice. Consequently, I have suggested that we need to take issue with notions of silence and denial. The aim of the study was to investigate how gender and resistance to silences and denials are relevant in personal, social and strategic narratives of transnational memories of the three violent conflicts in Indonesia (1942–2015) and to pay special attention to notions of identity, agency, time and place/space. Theorizing about how feelings and emotions of hope and outrage can lead to activism is useful as a way to study resistance (Rigney, 2018). Here, I suggest that, in particular, theorizing about transnational affective relations (Hemmings, 2012;

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

181

Pedwell, 2014) is useful for my purpose of studying gender and resistance. In the following, I will illustrate my argument by answering my normative question about time, place, space and agency in Home: what do ‘we’ think of past, present and future? I will use examples involving different characters. Theorizing about transnational affective relations provides a useful vocabulary (both in general and for my study) for research on feelings, emotions and affect in transitional justice and the politics of memory and activism. I would like to suggest that the sensitivity to power, privilege and intersectional inequalities in transnational affective relations theorizing could help to strengthen theorizing on the triad model of victim, perpetrator and bystander, since it avoids marginalizing any of these categories. Another reason is that it is possible to relate transnational affective relations and affective citizenship to politics of memory, activism and belonging (on intersectionality and the politics of belonging, see Yuval-Davis, 2011). Relatedly, Parashar defines affective citizenship as a necessary precondition for the creation and sustenance of postcolonial statehood. She argues that states use affective language in their political and policy discourse in order to construct national and historical narratives. They confer rights and privileges on compliant citizens, by means of their emotional language, and they police and punish those who challenge the state’s power and authority (Parashar, 2018; see also Beauchamps, 2018). Pedwell uses the term ‘affective relations’ to emphasize the relational nature of emotions. She argues that individual subjects do not own emotions and she rejects the isolation of individual emotions as unified and discrete entities. Rather, she suggests that we understand emotions as a sign of complex relations that implicate and constitute many affective subjects, objects and contexts. In addition, affective relations are an indication of the ways in which emotions take shape and circulate through their interactions with other emotions (Pedwell, 2014, pp. 17–18). For example, we can think about how emotions and feelings of shame or nostalgia (which can lead to silence and denial and, for example, postcolonial shame or nostalgia, such as in Chapter 4) can interact with emotions of anger, empathy or hope (which can lead to everyday resistance and collective action, such as that illustrated in Chapters 4–7). An example from Home showing how emotions can be a sign of complex relations that implicate and constitute many affective subjects, objects and contexts is the previously described character of Rama, who is

182

P. STOLTZ

ashamed and denies the memories of the past of his ‘E.T.’ family, given the structures of intersectional inequalities and historical injustices in Indonesian society. I can illustrate the ways in which emotions take shape and circulate through their interactions with other emotions by using Chudori’s description of how, eventually, Rama’s feelings of shame interact with emotions of sorrow and hope during the student uprisings of 1998. On this occasion, Rama thanks Lintang for telling his girlfriend’s family about her ‘E.T.’ father, and thereby disclosing Rama’s family history to them (Chudori, 2015, pp. 443–448). Chudori describes this as follows. After the military shot a number of unarmed students and injured numerous others during student demonstrations at Trisakti University in Jakarta in May 1998, students, alumni and public figures gather at the university to mourn their deaths collectively. During the public mourning, Lintang meets Rama while listening to speeches by figures such as Ali Sadikin, former governor of Jakarta, and Adnan Buyung Nasution, a leading human rights lawyer and activist (Chudori, 2015, pp. 443–448). Rama looked at Adnan Buyung and clapped when the lawyer said that no matter what happened, the process of reform must begin today. I studied Rama’s face; his features were twitching with evident emotion… … He looked as if – how can I describe it? – as if he was proud to be part of what was happening. Were my eyes deceiving me? Rama looked at me as if he wanted to say something but was reluctant to speak. Finally: ‘Lintang…’ Yes…’ ‘Thank you.’ That was a true shock. (Chudori, 2015, pp. 448–449)

There are traumatic events and histories that transform into collective forms of meaning and feeling and that distinguish a community as what Hutchison calls an ‘affective community’. This requires particular circumstances, such as certain instances of suffering and certain bodies becoming part of a collective memory and consciousness. Other instances and bodies will not be included (Hutchison, 2016, 2019). The so-called Trisakti tragedy [Tragedi Trisakti] became such an example of a traumatic event that turned into collective forms of meaning and feeling. It distinguished Indonesian student activists and other activists as an affective community, when they collectively hit the streets. Chudori describes this in the

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

183

novel and explains how, after the shootings at Trisakti University, the situation off-campus quickly heated up. Followed by mass demonstrations across the country, this eventually led to the fall of the New Order regime (Chudori, 2015, pp. 443–448, 466–479). Not all instances of suffering or all bodies are included in affective solidarities (Hutchison, 2016, 2019). Let me turn to Platt, Davies and Bennett, who recently commented on what Rigney has termed ‘the memory of activism’, in this case the memories of the violence used by the state and the military during the 1998 student uprisings. They point out that reformers saw the state abuse of military power and the threat of military violence against Indonesians who publicly denounced the government as immoral (Platt, Davies & Bennett, 2018, p. 4; Rigney, 2018). I can illustrate this in Home, when Chudori describes the effects of this violence. Very briefly, Lintang reflects upon suffering and bodies that often fall outside of affective solidarities. Even today, several days after the firestorm, there were no other words for it: Jakarta in the morning light was a hell, completely distressed from torture. Television news programs constantly aired horrific images of burned victims – stacked in piles and put into black bags like so much rubbish. And I can’t even make myself talk about the attacks on and the rapes of women of ethnic Chinese descent. The stories of perversion were so utterly grotesque they made my head want to explode. (Chudori, 2015, pp. 467–468)

If we want to theorize the transnational links between emotions, power and social transformation, then, following Pedwell, we need to consider how emotions and feelings overlap with structural relations of power that are located in time, place and space (Pedwell, 2014, p. 18). As already mentioned, these power relations can concern structural intersectional inequalities and marginalization, which might or might not provoke reactions. A sense that everything is normal and as it should be (such as in cases of male privilege, white privilege, heteronormativity, privilege because of one’s belonging to the ‘right’ class or political ideology), does not necessarily lead to the urge for change, although there are exceptions, as I have discussed previously. I can illustrate this with what happened after the mass rape that Lintang describes in the quote above, both by means of the Indonesian state and by means of what Cohen called audiences of ‘bystander states’ in the

184

P. STOLTZ

United Nations. Nowadays, this mass rape of Indonesian Chinese women and girls is called the May Tragedy and even at the time of writing in the late 2010s, these events fall outside of transnational affective solidarities. Platt, Davies and Bennett point out that many Indonesian observers correctly saw this violence as an organized campaign of terror, whereas other sectors of society denied the occurrence of sexual violence. After May 1998, the National Commission on Violence against Women [Komnas Perempuan] systematically gathered evidence from survivors and their families, providing proof of these crimes, but there is ongoing reluctance by the state to take moral responsibility or to formally acknowledge this violence (Platt et al., 2018, p. 4). From an international perspective, emerging global norms around gender and human rights have played a crucial role in perceiving the issue of sexual violence as a matter of justice. A central document in relation to these norms is the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security of 2000, which was adopted two years after the May Tragedy. As explained in Chapter 3, the Indonesian Government declared the Women, Peace and Security agenda irrelevant to the Indonesian context, in order to avoid any association with armed conflicts and struggles such as those in Aceh, Papua and Maluka (Lee-Koo & Trojanowska, 2017; Veneracion-Rallonza, 2016; both refer to Kholifah, 2014). Although feelings of hope and empathy can lead to transnational affective solidarities, it would be too simplistic to assume and expect reciprocity to be a central element of empathy or, for that matter, of transnational affective relations (Hemmings, 2012, pp. 152–153; see also Pedwell, 2014). This would universalize the experiences of categories of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and observers in unrealistic ways. It would hinder the ability to address how transitional justice measures can reinforce intersectional inequalities and thus hinder fruitful thinking about relevant transitional justice measures that make sense in different contexts of time, place and space. We can recognize organized resistance to denials of moral and political responsibility and a lack of reciprocity at a collective level, as the example of the UN and the Indonesian state demonstrates. I can also illustrate this with an example at an individual level. In Home, Lintang has travelled from Paris to Jakarta in order to film people talking about their memories of what happened to the victims of the genocide of 1965 and its impact on the families of these victims. That is, I interpret this as though she is an engaged transnational memory activist. However, in a letter to her parents

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

185

in France in which she discusses the student uprisings, the character of Lintang is surprised that these demonstrations demanding governmental reform and the resignation of President Suharto do not make more use of the memories of violence by the New Order regime that is about to be overthrown. She writes: Something I find strange here is that so few of the young people I’ve met are interested in the subject of history. I get the distinct impression that people like Alam […] are not representative of the younger Indonesian generation at all. They are activist-intellectuals who have been formed by history. (Chudori, 2015, p. 441)

I interpret this as meaning that, in this quote, Chudori is commenting on how she considers that, in the non-fictional world, many of the activists who took part in the student uprisings of 1998 did not recognize the transnational affective solidarity (of characters such as the French Indonesian Lintang) with the victims and families of victims of the 1965 genocide. I understand this to mean that she is suggesting that the affective solidarities and communities that emerged during the uprisings concentrated their demands upon the future, rather than the past. Reform, rather than reconciliation or recognition of political and moral responsibility for the violent past, were on the agenda. It is as though in this quote Chudori wants to say that, for some Indonesian and transnational memory activists, the uprisings were a natural consequence of their earlier experiences, feelings and emotions, while for many others this did not matter. How can we explain this difference in attitude? Affective dissonance is one suggestion for what is required to enable affective solidarity and affective communities to emerge. Hemmings understands affective dissonance as ‘the judgment arising from the distinction between experience and the world’ (Hemmings, 2012, p. 157) or, in other words, that politics is ‘that which moves us, rather than that which confirms us in what we already know’ (Hemmings, 2012, p. 151). A feeling of dissonance might lead us to feel a sense of injustice, which can perhaps lead to a desire to rectify it (Åhäll, 2019, p. 156). It is important to include these instances of ‘might’ and ‘perhaps’, because an account of affective solidarity that understands experience as dynamic rather than essentialization can acknowledge that a historically

186

P. STOLTZ

and politically grounded hostility is as likely to occur as mutual understanding if we want to characterize relations with others. This realization has also led feminist theorists to move away from empathy and towards a renewed focus on self-reflection from a different angle. In line with this, Hemmings has argued that we can theorize affective dissonance as a desire for transformation, which is sensitive to notions of power and privilege (Hemmings, 2012, pp. 153–158).

7.6

Transnational Affective Relations

I find that notions of affective dissonance and transnational affective relations are very helpful in illuminating why the silences and denials related to the memories of violent conflicts in Indonesia continue, despite an increased acceptance of global norms on transitional justice. They are also helpful in considering how gender and resistance to silences and denials are relevant in personal, social and strategic narratives of transnational memories of the three violent conflicts in Indonesia. The research field of memory politics has produced much research on silence and denial and, following Rigney on trauma, because it has had a strong focus on victimhood and ‘the interplay between representation and “unrepresentability” in cases of mass violence and suffering’ (Rigney, 2018, p. 370). This is perhaps not surprising because, in many ways, memories are about the past. The research field of transitional justice, in turn, has produced more research on strategies for the future and the rectification of historical injustices by way of a focus on politics and the law, and increasingly on cultural instruments. Also within transitional justice, there has been more focus on victims and perpetrators, although a recent turn towards the everyday and cultural measures to address historical injustices has provided more opportunities to include bystanders. I think it is fruitful to combine these two research fields and to suggest that a critical study of transnational affective relations can help both. This is because both could benefit from more nuanced understandings of transnational affective relations, not only beyond the national, but also beyond universalizing understandings of the feelings and emotions of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and observers. If we assume that not all victims are women, not all men are perpetrators and not all observers are passive, then neither is there any reason to assume that we should universalize the feelings and emotions relating to these categories. The use of affective approaches, just like intersectional, queer and masculinity

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

187

approaches, could help in the quest to develop more holistic approaches to transitional justice and the politics of memory. Hopefully, this can in turn influence normative political considerations and enable better strategies to obtain equality as well as both historical and social justice.

References Åhäll, L. (2019). Feeling everyday IR: Embodied, affective, militarising movement as choreography of war. Cooperation and Conflict, 54(2), 149–166. Åhäll, L., & Gregory, T. (2013). Security, emotions, affect. Critical Studies on Security, 1(1), 117–120. Beauchamps, M. (2018). Governing affective citizenship: Denaturalization, belonging, and repression. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Cho, S., Crenshaw, K. W., & McCall, L. (2013). Intersectionality: Theorizing power, empowering theory. Signs, 38(4), 785–810. Christensen, A.-D., & Qvotrup Jensen, S. (2014). Combining hegemonic masculinity and intersectionality. NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(1), 60–75. Cohen, S. (2001). States of Denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cohen, S., & Husain, E. (2008). States of denial and the secular state. RSA Journal, 154(5534), 48–49. Crawford, N. C. (2000). The passion of world politics: Propositions on emotion and emotional relationships. International Security, 24(4), 116–156. Crenshaw, K. W. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 8, 139–167. de Greiff, P. (2012). Theorizing transitional justice. In M. S. Williams, R. Nagy, & J. Elster (Eds.), Transitional justice: Nomos Li (pp. 31–77). New York: New York University Press. Edkins, J. (2003). Trauma and the memory of politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gready, P., & Robins, S. (2014). From transitional to transformative justice: A new agenda for practice. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 8, 339–361. Hancock, A.-M. (2016). Intersectionality: An intellectual history. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press and Oxford Scholarship Online. Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. Hill Collins, P. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual Review of Sociology, 41, 1–20. Hirsch, M. (1997). Family frames: Photography, narrative and postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

188

P. STOLTZ

Hirsch, M. (2008). The generation of postmemory. Poetics Today, 29(1), 103–128. Hirsch, M. (2012). The generation of postmemory: Writing and visual culture after the Holocaust. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Hirsch, M., & Smith, V. (2002). Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction. Signs, 28(1), 1–19. Hutchison, E. (2016). Affective communities in world politics: Collective emotions after trauma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hutchison, E. (2019). Emotions, bodies, and the un/making of international relations. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47 (2), 284–298. Kansteiner, W. (2019). Migration, racism, and memory. Memory Studies, 12(6), 611–616. Kholifah, D. R. (2014). Indonesian implementation of UNSCR 1325: Adapting to the national context. https://www.womenpeacemakersprogram.org/news/ indonesian-implementation-ofunscr-1325-adapting-to-the-national-context/. Lee-Koo, K., & Trojanowska, B. K. (2017). Does the United Nations’ Women, Peace and Security Agenda speak with, for or to women in the Asia Pacific? The development of national action plans in the Asia Pacific. Critical Studies on Security, 5(3), 287–301. Mihr, A. (2017). An introduction to transitional justice. In O. Simic (Ed.), An introduction to transitional justice (pp. 1–28). London: Routledge. Molden, B. (2010). Vietnam, the new left and the Holocaust: How the Cold War changed discourse on genocide. In A. Assmann & S. Conrad (Eds.), Memory in a global age: Discourses, practices and trajectories (pp. 79–96). Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Parashar, S. (2018). The postcolonial/emotional state: Mother India’s response to her deviant Maoist children. In S. Parashar, J. A. Tickner, & J. True (Eds.), Revisiting gendered states: Feminist imaginings of the state in international relations (pp. 157–173). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press and Oxford Scholarship Online. Pedwell, C. (2014). Affective relations: The transnational politics of empathy. Basingstoke, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Pedwell, C. (2017). Mediated habits: Images, networked affect and social change. Subjectivity, 10, 147–169. Platt, M., Davies, S. G., & Bennett, L. R. (2018). Contestations of gender, sexuality and morality in contemporary Indonesia. Asian Studies Review, 42(1), 1–15. Rigney, A. (2018). Remembering hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. Rothberg, M. (2019). The implicated subject: Beyond victims and perpetrators. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

7

DENIAL, HOPE AND TRANSNATIONAL AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

189

Stoler, A. L. (2011). Colonial aphasia: Race and disabled histories in France. Public Culture, 23(1), 121–156. Veneracion-Rallonza, M. L. (2016). Building the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the ASEAN through multi-focal norm entrepreneurship. Global Responsibility to Protect, 8, 158–179. Wekker, G. (2016). White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The politics of belonging. London: Sage. Zwingel, S. (2016). Translating international women’s rights: The CEDAW convention in context. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Novels Chudori, L. (2012). Pulang. Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia. Chudori, L. (2015). Home (Indonesian original, Pulang, 2012). Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum Publishing.

Index

A Accountability, 52, 163, 164, 177 Activism, 3, 7, 17, 35, 51, 65, 66, 68, 70, 166, 167, 169, 180, 181 The Act of Killing , 6, 68 Affect, 3, 35, 36, 42, 134, 160, 161, 165, 166, 181 Affective citizenship, 170, 181 Affective community, 36, 69, 161, 166, 182 Affective dissonance, 17, 161, 162, 166, 167, 170, 185, 186 Affective relations, 34, 36, 166, 174, 175, 181 Affective solidarity(ies), 161, 166, 183–185 Agency, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 23, 24, 34, 78–80, 82, 83, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98, 105, 106, 108, 109, 119, 120, 123, 124, 136, 140, 149, 162, 164, 168, 174, 175, 180, 181 Annan, Kofi, 52, 53

Anti-Communism, 62, 68, 131, 146, 153 Apology, 62, 64, 68 Assumptions, 2, 7, 14, 15, 23, 25–29, 32, 37, 38, 41, 42, 50–53, 86, 107, 121, 130, 132, 135, 161, 172 Authoritarianism, 2, 6, 13, 41, 60, 66, 70, 130, 132, 139, 144, 145, 167

B Backpay, 58, 59, 63 Belanda, 114 Binary(ies), 16, 130, 131, 133–138, 140–142, 144–150, 152, 162, 171 Black feminists, 24, 105 Bystanders, 9, 14–16, 89, 99, 109, 117, 124, 141, 162, 165, 170–173, 175, 181, 184, 186 Bystander states, 165, 172, 173, 183

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 P. Stoltz, Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts, Memory Politics and Transitional Justice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41095-7

191

192

INDEX

C Chinese ethnic minority group, 132, 134, 153 Cissexism, 135, 146 Civic trust, 25, 163 Class, 7, 24, 32, 33, 63, 69, 90, 105, 134, 141–143, 147, 148, 153, 163, 178, 183 The Cold War, 60, 139, 143 Collective memory, 28, 30, 36, 55, 182 Collective responsibility, 162 Colonial aphasia, 161, 178 Colonialism, 23, 24, 31, 32, 56, 66, 69, 70, 80, 82, 87, 89, 90, 105–107, 109, 111, 114, 120, 121, 134 Colonial terminology indo, 113 Indo-Europeaan, 113 Indo-Peranakan, 113 Colonial violence, 80 Comfort women, 7, 55, 65, 66, 70 Communists, 6, 13, 61, 130, 132, 134, 139, 143, 145, 153, 177–179 Complex implication, 162, 163, 174 Counter-narratives, 9, 10, 39, 116, 121, 130, 144, 146, 150, 151 Crimes against humanity, 6, 54, 56, 65, 132, 141, 150 Critical genocide studies, 16, 131, 136, 149, 152, 153 Critical military studies, 114

D ‘Debt of honour’, 58 Decolonization, 9, 49, 52, 54–57, 62, 69, 107, 114, 116 Democracy, 25–27, 29, 36, 130, 132, 152, 154, 163, 180

Denials, 2–5, 7–9, 11–17, 26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50, 56, 59, 62, 65, 69, 70, 78–80, 82, 98, 104, 108, 111, 122, 136, 150, 153, 155, 159–162, 164–167, 171–173, 175–181, 184, 186 Diaspora, 15, 29, 63, 69, 78, 81–83, 91, 93–95 Diasporic identity(ies), 15, 79, 81, 86, 87, 89–95, 99

E Emotion(s), 3, 8, 11, 13, 14, 17, 35, 36, 42, 59, 69, 70, 85, 155, 160, 161, 165, 166, 169, 174, 175, 179–183, 185, 186 Equality, 2, 12, 27, 32, 43, 98, 136, 153, 161, 164, 187 Eurocentrism, 15, 23, 31, 63, 104, 108, 122, 124 The events of 1965, 6, 160, 176 Everyday resistance, 14, 34, 79, 82, 94, 95, 98, 99, 120, 180, 181 External audiences, 165, 172, 173

F Feeling, 16, 17, 36, 42, 85, 97, 123, 155, 161, 164–167, 169, 170, 174, 176, 179–186 Femininity, 146 Feminist international relations, 41, 114 Feminist security studies, 79, 80 First generation, 79–81, 88, 93, 96, 97, 113, 116, 169, 173 First-generation postcolonial migrants, 78, 87, 97, 107 Forgetting, 7, 119, 148

INDEX

G Gender, 2–4, 7, 8, 12–17, 24, 26, 27, 31–34, 42, 49, 54–57, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 78, 83, 86, 95, 99, 105, 106, 112, 114, 117, 120, 124, 130, 131, 133–135, 138, 141–144, 146–148, 152– 155, 163, 164, 167, 180, 181, 184, 186 Generations, 15, 24, 79–81, 84, 86, 87, 95, 99, 104, 114, 124, 142, 144, 163, 173, 174, 180, 185 Genocide, 1, 6–8, 16, 32, 34, 35, 49, 53, 54, 56, 57, 61, 62, 65, 68–70, 130–135, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 148–151, 153, 160, 162, 171, 184, 185 The Genocide Convention, 53, 54, 132 Genocide studies, 16, 131, 133, 134, 140 Gerwani (the Indonesian Women’s Movement/Gerakan Wanita Indonesia), 8, 146–148, 150–152 Globalization, 11, 14, 23, 28, 29, 31, 107, 116, 120 Guided Democracy, 6, 60

H Healing rituals, 4, 26, 52 Hegemonic masculinities, 15, 99, 104, 105, 107, 109, 115, 116, 120, 123, 124 Hegemony under construction, 106 Heteronormativity, 135, 143, 146, 183 Heterosexism, 154 Heterosexuality, 91, 135, 143, 146, 154 Homophobia, 154 Homosexuality, 154

193

Human rights abuses, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 58, 65, 66, 70, 103, 109, 111, 118, 150, 151 I Ibuism, 146, 147, 152 Identity, 11, 12, 16, 23, 28, 40, 50, 78, 81, 82, 84, 86–92, 96–99, 105, 106, 112, 114, 116, 120, 121, 123, 124, 130, 131, 133–135, 138, 140, 142–145, 148, 149, 152, 162, 164, 176, 180 Implicated subject(s), 16, 162, 163, 166, 171–173, 176, 178, 180 Implicatory denial, 8, 39, 165, 177, 178 Indisch, 58, 83, 97, 113 Indische Nederlanders , 88, 113 Individual/biographical memory, 1, 2, 8, 10, 13, 28, 78, 89, 164 The Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia/ PKI), 67, 144 The Indonesian Declaration of Independence, 5, 56 Inequality(ies), 2, 7, 15, 23–26, 29, 31, 36, 59, 66, 78, 81, 86, 87, 98, 99, 105, 113, 116, 121–124, 135–137, 144, 148, 149, 152, 163, 170, 172, 174 Internal audiences, 165, 172, 173 The International People’s Tribunal for 1965, 6, 9, 62, 68, 132 Interpretive denial, 165, 176, 177, 179 Intersectional inequalities, 2, 15, 24, 31, 43, 62, 79, 86, 95, 105, 119, 122, 131, 135, 136, 139, 141–143, 146–148, 151, 153, 154, 161, 163, 166, 171, 179, 181–184

194

INDEX

Intersectionality, 2, 7, 15, 24, 33, 34, 42, 86, 87, 89, 95, 98, 105, 106, 109, 111, 116, 134, 181

J Justice, 2, 4, 9, 12, 24–27, 32, 43, 52, 55, 62, 67, 98, 106, 129, 130, 136, 137, 140, 149, 152, 153, 161, 163, 164, 184, 187

K The KNIL (the Royal Dutch Indies Army), 58–59, 82, 142 Komnas HAM (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia), 62

L Lekra (Institute of People’s Culture/Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat ), 146, 150, 151 Lemkin, Raphael, 53, 132, 134 LGBT persons, 130 The Linggajati Agreement (1946), 60 Literal denial, 165, 175–177 The local–global nexus, 17, 41 The Look of Silence, 6, 68

M Marginalization(s), 16, 79, 95, 130, 131, 134–136, 140, 148–150, 152, 153, 183 Marginalized masculinities, 105 Masculinity(ies), 3, 15, 33, 42, 104– 107, 111, 112, 115, 119–124, 155, 163, 186 Masculinity studies, 114 Mass killings, 6, 61, 68 Mass violence, 4, 5, 8, 13, 17, 34, 54, 57, 63, 64, 66, 103, 104,

109–111, 117–119, 141, 145, 148, 168, 186 The May Tragedy, 184 Memorandum of Excesses [Excessennota], 57 Memory activism, 63, 161, 169 Memory(ies), 1–4, 6–11, 14, 17, 28, 29, 31, 32, 49, 50, 55, 57, 62, 67, 78, 97, 107, 108, 112, 117, 122, 145, 149, 160, 162, 167, 169, 170, 174, 180, 181, 187 carriers of, 29, 107 travelling of, 29, 30 Memory politics, 2, 4, 9, 14, 23, 25, 27, 28, 41, 42, 119, 155, 161, 166, 186 Men, 6, 16, 32, 105–107, 112, 121–124, 130, 131, 133, 146, 148, 153, 162, 177 Methodological nationalism, 11, 29, 43, 117, 142 Migration, 17, 29, 94, 106, 121 Military masculinities, 114, 116 Moral judgement, 12, 40, 96 Multidirectional memory, 119 Multiple masculinities, 104, 105 Multiplicity, 38, 92, 95, 144 N Narration, 38, 86, 105 Narrative analysis, 12, 13, 24, 27, 42, 50 Narrative mobility, 40, 41 Narratives, 1, 2, 4, 8–11, 13–17, 23, 24, 29–31, 36–42, 50, 57, 59, 67, 68, 78–82, 89, 91–93, 95, 97, 104, 107–109, 111–113, 115, 116, 119–124, 130, 135, 136, 138–146, 148–150, 153, 165, 168, 169, 177, 178, 181 National Commission on Violence against Women (Komisi Nasional

INDEX

Anti-Kekerasan terhadap Perempuan), 62 Nationality, 7, 24, 105, 114, 147 Nation-building, 11, 16, 124, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141, 146, 148, 149, 152, 176 New Order, 6, 8, 60, 66, 67, 70, 130, 136, 146, 149, 150, 153, 154, 168, 169, 178, 183, 185 Non-judicial mechanisms, 52 Normalization, 135, 140, 141 Norms, 2–4, 13, 14, 16, 17, 23, 25–27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 39, 49–57, 59, 61, 63, 66, 69, 70, 132, 135, 136, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 180, 184, 186 appropriation, 23, 27 cascading, 51 contestation, 23, 27 emergence, 51 internalization, 51 sexual, 133, 134 translation, 23, 27 Nostalgia, 161, 179, 181 The Nuremberg Trials (1945–1946), 53

O Observers, 3, 5, 9, 14, 16, 17, 61, 151, 154, 155, 161, 163, 165, 166, 169–176, 180, 184, 186 Organized resistance, 5, 9, 14, 34, 49, 62, 63, 70, 80, 166, 184

P Pancasila, 129, 151 Peace, 9, 26, 27, 29, 53–55, 57, 61, 66, 119, 121, 130, 132, 184 Peacekeeping, 54, 55

195

Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the September 30 Movement/PKI ), 67, 144–147, 168 Perpetrators, 3, 4, 8–10, 14–17, 26, 57, 68, 78, 79, 89, 99, 109, 117, 124, 130, 131, 133, 134, 140, 141, 143, 148, 153, 155, 161–166, 169–177, 180, 181, 184, 186 Personal narrative, 37–39, 41, 42 Place, 1, 5, 6, 10–12, 14, 15, 17, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 36, 37, 42, 49, 51, 53, 64, 66, 68, 70, 81, 83, 87, 89, 93, 95, 98, 105, 107, 109, 116, 117, 119, 121, 124, 137, 140, 141, 150, 151, 159, 160, 163, 165, 167, 169, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184 Political heterosexism, 155 Political homophobia, 153–155 Political violence, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 86, 92–94, 121 The Politics of Belonging, 10, 24, 116, 134, 170, 174, 181 Politics of deployment, 98 Politics of location, 3, 15, 104, 107, 124 Politics of self-transformation, 97 Postcolonial amnesia, 8 Postcolonial feminist, 31, 33, 70 Postcolonial memory politics, 31, 35, 107, 119 Postcolonial migration, 13, 23, 106, 109 Postcolonial nostalgia, 5, 10, 41 Postcolonial perspectives, 23, 34, 99, 106 Postcolonial terminology, 113 Indisch, 113 Indo, 113

196

INDEX

Post-conflict transformations, 2, 13, 14, 16, 32, 37, 41, 56, 63, 105, 120–122, 124, 130, 131, 134–136, 149, 152, 162 Postmemory, 96, 173 Post-moral denial, 8, 130, 149, 165 Privilege, 88, 89, 95, 97–99, 123, 162, 163, 172, 174, 176–179, 181, 183, 186 Q Queer, 3, 15, 16, 42, 78, 81, 82, 94, 131, 133–136, 141, 144, 147, 149, 152–155, 163, 186 Queer diaspora, 81, 98 R Race, 2, 7, 24, 33, 58, 63, 69, 80, 81, 83, 86–90, 95, 99, 105, 112, 114, 124, 142, 163 Racial discrimination, 80 Racism, 15, 35, 80, 95, 98, 104, 108, 109, 114, 120–124, 134 Recognition, 2, 4, 25, 26, 42, 55, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 88, 121, 123, 163, 185 Reconciliation, 6, 11, 13, 25, 26, 52, 63, 65, 68, 78, 95, 98, 130, 163, 164, 185 Reformasi, 6, 62, 67, 154, 169 The Renville Agreement (1948), 60, 110 Representations, 3, 11, 30, 35–37, 40, 79, 86, 107, 142, 186 Resistance, 2–4, 8–15, 17, 23, 27, 30–32, 34, 36, 41–43, 50, 58, 60, 63, 69, 70, 78, 84, 85, 98, 104, 106, 116, 122, 149, 164–167, 180, 181, 186 Responsibility, 2–4, 7–9, 14–16, 27, 42, 49, 62, 70, 78, 79,

104, 148–150, 153, 159, 160, 163–166, 178, 184, 185 Roots, 78, 81, 82, 85, 90–93, 95, 110, 111, 114, 121 Routes, 81, 82, 90, 91, 93, 95, 111 S Second generation, 78, 89, 96, 97, 116, 169, 173, 174 Second-generation postcolonial migrants, 78, 99 Security, 27, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 66, 78, 80, 89, 179, 184 The September 30 Movement (Gerakan Tiga Puluh September/G30S), 144 Sexuality, 7, 16, 24, 92, 130, 134, 135, 138, 141–144, 146, 154, 155, 163 Sexual violence, 2, 7, 8, 16, 55, 65, 66, 70, 79, 80, 85, 94, 98, 122, 131, 145, 171, 184 Silences, 2–4, 7–9, 12–16, 26, 27, 30–32, 42, 49, 50, 55, 69, 70, 78–82, 89, 91, 92, 94–99, 103, 104, 108, 111, 114, 122–124, 136, 153, 161, 164, 168, 180, 181, 186 The silent security dilemma, 80 Social change, 13, 41, 104, 123, 169, 179 Social inequalities, 2, 14, 33, 34, 42, 105, 106, 119, 120, 163 Social narratives, 13, 14, 17, 38–42, 80, 95, 114, 119, 144, 164 Social reality, 40 Social transformation, 36, 183 Solidarity, 3, 58, 66, 69, 97, 149, 161 Space, 3, 10–12, 14, 15, 17, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 41, 42, 79–81, 89, 105–107, 109, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 142, 147,

INDEX

160, 163, 165, 169, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184 Special solidarity, 58, 63 State Ibuism, 146, 154 State Straightism, 154 Stereotype, 122, 138, 140, 148 Story, 37, 38, 41, 81, 86, 90–92, 118, 136, 143, 172 Strategic narratives, 2, 12, 36, 39, 41, 42, 50, 53, 56, 57, 69, 70, 144, 145, 177, 180, 186 Suharto (President), 6, 8, 60–62, 67, 68, 70, 130, 137, 145–147, 167, 168, 170, 178, 185 Sukarno (President), 6, 56, 59, 60, 67, 129, 137, 139, 144, 145, 147, 171, 175 T Tellability, 40, 41, 123 Text, 37, 38, 40 Time, 3, 8–15, 17, 24, 28–30, 33, 37, 38, 40–42, 50, 51, 53, 61–63, 68, 80, 81, 83, 89, 90, 94, 95, 105, 107–109, 111, 114–118, 123, 124, 130, 133–136, 138, 140, 142, 144–148, 150, 159, 160, 162, 163, 167–170, 172, 174, 175, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184 The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (1946–1948), 53 Totok, 87, 88, 97, 113, 114 Transcultural memory(ies), 108 Transitional justice, 1–4, 9, 14, 16, 17, 23–29, 31, 35, 39, 41, 42, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55–57, 59, 63, 69, 70, 114, 119, 121, 122, 124, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 140, 142, 149–155, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170, 174, 176, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187

197

Transnational advocacy networks (TANs), 51 Transnational affective relations, 16, 17, 155, 161, 165–167, 180, 181, 184, 186 Transnationalism, 11, 15, 31, 109 Transnational memory(ies), 2, 3, 10–12, 15, 17, 29–33, 39, 41–43, 63, 64, 69, 70, 78, 81, 97, 104, 106–108, 112, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122–124, 159, 161, 163, 180, 184–186 Trauma, 3, 11, 14, 35, 36, 69, 78, 93, 96, 131, 180, 186 Trisakti tragedy [Tragedi Trisakti], 182 Truth, 4, 6, 26, 40, 65, 68, 78, 118, 122, 130, 150, 154, 175 U The United Nations, 2, 50, 53–56, 61, 184 UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, 39, 55, 184 V Veterans, 5, 6, 9, 30, 92, 107, 147 Victims, 3, 4, 8, 9, 14–17, 26, 30, 32, 35, 49, 55, 57, 58, 63, 64, 66–69, 78, 79, 89, 99, 103, 104, 109, 117, 124, 130–133, 140, 141, 147, 148, 153, 155, 161–163, 165, 166, 168–176, 180, 183–186 Voice, 14, 15, 17, 24, 69, 78–80, 82, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 97, 98, 105, 123, 129, 132, 136, 149, 160, 164 Vulnerability(ies), 131, 135, 136, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153

198

INDEX

W War crimes, 5, 9, 54–56, 104, 117, 118 Wayang , 136–138 Welfare-state building, 11 White innocence, 7, 80, 81, 88, 92, 97, 99, 119, 123, 161, 178 Whiteness, 81, 87, 88, 90, 95, 113, 123

White privilege, 80, 90, 99, 183 Widodo, Joko (President), 6, 62, 67, 68 Women, 6, 8, 16, 26, 32, 33, 55, 61, 65, 66, 79, 97, 98, 105, 106, 111, 122, 130, 131, 133, 139, 145–148, 152, 153, 183, 184, 186 Women’s human rights, 55