Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia

Making usable pasts: Collaboration, labour and activism in the archive

“…I felt her commitment to the provision of what she described as “collections of social justice” required more than an acknowledgement and could illustrate much about archives more broadly. Her remarks relating to Scottish working‐class history are salient to the continuing need to document, preserve and provide counter‐narratives, as shown by Doreen Lee () in her work on “activist archives” of student movements in Indonesia. Below, my engagement with these themes is framed through an engagement with literatures that have worked closely with broad notions of usable pasts.…”

“…The experiences considered here can be linked with other like‐minded projects across the UK, such as the People's History Museum in Manchester and The Sparrows’ Nest in Nottingham . Archival interventions for the political left are particularly crucial because documents and histories of resistance and activism, as Lee () points out, can often remain “hidden.” Such positioning of the archive as a site of retrieval for usable pasts suggests a continuing need for collaboration between archives, communities and participatory research in times of austerity.…”

Politics of youth survival in times of crisis

“…Youthful ideals marked the multiple ruptures in Indonesia's political history: They were the key players of the anti-colonial movement, critical of the early post-colonial governance, and they were the pro-democracy activists at the turn of the century with Indonesia's Reformasi in 1998. The legacies signal the "pemuda fever" that legitimates and naturalizes the educated youth's critical nationalist fervour as well as the role of youth in the nation's progress (Lee 2016). Young people in Indonesia, in other words, are taught to live up to the myth of the progressive and nationalist youth before them in the anti-colonial and pro-democracy narratives.…”

Alessandra Lopez y Royo. Contemporary Indonesian Fashion: Through the Looking Glass. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020, ix-216 pp. ISBN: 978-1-3500-6130-9

“…Her book is a welcome resource for anyone seeking to know more about the institutions, individuals and innovations associated with the Indonesian fashion scene, and as such joins a growing collection of analyses of Indonesian visual and political life (cf. Lee 2016;Strassler 2010Strassler , 2020. Saturating the book is genuine affection for Indonesian designers and designs.…”