Beyond empire and nation

Abstract

Writing history is a political activity. Generally speaking, history follows power, and the history of decolonization is no exception to this rule. Whether told from the perspective of colonizer or colonized, popular narratives of decolonization often reflect national historical frameworks, geographical boundaries, and chronologies, though motivation, logic, morality, and much else likely differ. Former colonizers had to adjust to the changed political geographies, which involved forgetting the nascent and hybrid identities of the late imperial era. The colonies that had been understood as part of the national destiny gradually became foreign. Decolonization, accompanied by the loss of colonial clout and sometimes as well by military and diplomatic defeat, set in motion a process at times characterized as wilful forgetting or selective memory. The most common word in the analyses of postcolonial memory in the metropolitan countries is 'silence'. 1 In the newly-founded countries too, a kind of wilful forgetting was at work, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes encouraged by policy. Public representations in the postcolonial states tend to conceive of decolonization as a common struggle against foreign rule or as the consummation of a national destiny. The coming of independence constituted a rupture, both in political discourse and in leadership; this often resulted in imposing a rigid national framework that eschews the confusing dynamics of societies in the period up to and during decolonization. To a large extent, nationalist leaders have encouraged the veiling of historically and morally unpalatable realities such as institutional continuities, collaborations, and violence. In former colonized and colonial countries alike, it was in many national politicians' interests to see independence as a new start, a clean slate, more the fulfilment of a promise than a process that would mark an enduring legacy. 1 The literature on the remembrance of empire is large and growing.

School Teachers and Soft Decolonisation in Dutch–Indonesian Relations, 1945–1949

“…It often neglects the overall process of challenges and responses that shaped the people's "hopes, fears and traumas unleashed in the course of struggle." 18 While decolonising societies have to deal with the social problems of governance, the unfulfilled hopes and complexities of identities related to citizenship and belonging, 19 the way these issues have been studied is generally overshadowed by large events at the national level moulded in a chronology. 20 The present paper argues that what happened in Indonesia during the 1945-1949 period was also a "soft decolonisation."…”