Activist archives: youth culture and the political past in Indonesia

Abstract

Almost two decades after the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998, we still know very little about the student movement that was the driving force behind Indonesia’s turn to democracy. In the post-Suharto era, the student movement lost the limelight to other actors better equipped for the game of politics, and thus moved ever deeper into the realm of collective memory as a feverish episode in history, aligned with the longer history of pemuda (youth) activism in Indonesia. Yet, as Doreen Lee persuasively argues in Activist Archives, it is from the edges of history that “pemuda fever” continues to “infuse the present with urgency and legitimacy” (p. 3), animating a “youthful culture of democracy” that firmly established radical styles and ideas within the political and cultural landscape of Jakarta. Remedying the dearth of literature on post-New Order student activism, Activist Archives offers a sophisticated ethnography of “Generation 98”, ingeniously structured around key tropes of the “material and ideational spaces” that student activists inhabit. With a keen eye for detail and paradox, Lee delves deep into the micropolitics of these spaces, starting with the “Archive”. She shows how activists’ feverish “drive to document, consign, and assemble signs of pemuda nationalism” (p. 11) served as an “authenticating practice” to compete with state discourse, which was, however, complicated by the concurrent need for secrecy, epitomized by the tacit rule: “Burn after reading”. By highlighting the social life behind the documentation, Lee uncovers significant findings that many other researchers might have overlooked. A charming example is a scene reconstructed from scribbles found on the back of official statements used during the 1997 subversion trials; it shows how two activists, waiting for their turn to testify, exchanged insolent jokes, conveying “the undercurrent of youthful nonchalance and puerile lightheartedness even during the gravity of the subversion trial” (p. 55). Youthfulness also pervades the chapters on “Street” and “Style”, which show how the performativity of protest and the carefully cultivated pemuda look helped to make subversive symbols of the left trendy and less threatening, thus creating “a new model of citizenship for Indonesian youth by making political participation desirable and accessible” (p. 91). In an engaging section on the production and circulation of protest T-shirts, Lee further illustrates