Hamenku Buwono, Sultan of Yogjakarta on his throne; portrait by Kassian Céphas 188
When Indonesia proclaimed its independence from Dutch colonial rule in 1945, the inhabitants of this vast archipelago characterized by a profusion of religions, languages, and cultures had little in common with each other beyond a desire to throw off the yoke of colonial rule. In this talk, I will discuss how popular photographic practices enabled this diverse collection of people to begin to see themselves as modern Indonesians. How did popular postcolonial photography recast colonial visual templates in new, national idioms? How did different popular genres, from amateur pictorialism to studio portraiture to identity photos, give rise to different ways of seeing the nation and its people? I will suggest that photography did not merely record the emergence of a new national identity but played an integral role in its formation.
KAREN STRASSLER
Karen is Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the social lives and political work of images. At the broadest level she is interested in studying the relationship between visuality and political imaginaries.. Her research focuses on the visual and media culture of contemporary Indonesia. She is the author of Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia (2020). She has recently been working on questions of visuality, violence, memory, and the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia, as well as a new project on bodies, images, and mediation.
View the entire series here.
Payments for Individual Lecture: TAASA members: $15, Non-members: $25
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