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ABSTRACT
This paper engages with the study of the aesthetic as an embodied form and offers a critique of the study of value and commodification that emerges in the global spatial imagination. I explore the neglected interrelationship between cultural-spatial reconstruction and land ownership as a sign of livelihood by way of a critique of development and through an investigation of the multiple traces of colonialism in Indonesia in contemporary times, after the massacres. First, land is taken from communities to be used for state and corporate industrialization, and then aesthetic acts of resistance and remembrance by members of these communities, via artistic productions and protest, are commoditized as touristic attractions by the state as a form of nationalism and fetishism of the indigenous, and by corporations as a form of corporate cultural responsibility. This new method of capitalist inclusion of the survivor in a globalized project of aestheticizing space is a neoliberal tactic in which the commoditized reappearance of the aesthetic creations of the marginalized is not, in fact, a sign of inclusion but rather of further displacement. My study follows the focus of this special issue to analyse cultural production within the complexity of multiple and converging colonial forms in historical and contemporary contexts considering the relationality, contradictions and incommensurabilities generated within converging structures of colonial and racialized violence. I locate the ways in which artistic projects within this schema may be used as acts of resistance but also possibly co-optation/ domination. Aesthetic creations intended as means of archiving may also bring insurrections into the paradigm of globalization and to its attention. This paper is an attempt to look at how the creative urge negates and also creates the possibility of resistance, inviting us to urgently rethink aesthetic projects and their representation through a genealogy of global participation.
Acknowledgements
My gratitude goes to the Institute for Advanced Study for hosting me while I wrote this paper, and also to the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change for the opportunity to present an early version of this paper. I thank Dia Da Costa and Alex Da Costa for all their support in helping this work reach a broader audience. Thank you also to Mas Oji for bringing me to abandoned sites and for allowing me access to the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rachmi Diyah Larasati is the author of The dance that makes you vanish: cultural reconstruction in Indonesia post genocide (University of Minnesota Press, 2013); she is Associate Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota, Faculty Advisor for Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, and senior affiliate at Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media.
Notes
1. While this sort of mass killing was similar to many events taking place around the world at the time, a defining aspect of the Indonesian example is how the military co-opted civilian grassroots organizations by turning them into militias.
2. In Toraja, the traditional location for the display of ancestors’ bodies is a cave, but any public space in the village may display the dead as an ‘archive of death.’
3. This work was inspired by my research collaboration on scarcity and abundance hosted by Institute for Advanced Study (along with Hakim Abderrezak and Marta Savigliano). However, in this essay I expand the question not only to deal with the aesthetic project (cultural expression in literature, music, and performance) but also with how the notion of expenditure sparks different routes for natural resources. Both the ideas of scarcity and of aesthetic origin are often located within the same geography and geopolitics. The idea of scarcity (of natural resources) emerged from the same place as the discourse of aesthetic value—the West.
4. I am inspired by Gomez-Barris (Citation2008) and Cho (Citation2008). In similar terrain, I continue to engage with the idea of replica that I proposed in The Dance that Makes You Vanish (Larasati Citation2013) and Gomez-Barris in The Extractive Zone (Citation2017).
5. Miyoshi (Citation1993, p. 79) writes that the mechanics of globalization look a lot like colonization.
6. Inspired by Da Costa (Citation2017), I expand the idea of creative participation through embodied forms. With a promise of rights from the state in dealing with economic disparity, citizens create artistic spaces to participate and to have a sense of belonging in the schema of global capitalism by transmitting their own traditions. This particular neoliberal inclusion, which nurtures the nationalism of the poor, is nevertheless merely an engagement between the postcolonial state and the metropole, and furthers centralization. The view of creative practice as a default motif of transcending inequality by generating entrepreneurial subjectivity, addressing poverty, and producing a tolerant society is at the core of this false promise. Here I use the term ‘industry,’ instead of ‘economy,’ because in the Indonesian context the relationship between artistic creativity and industry (mining) provokes a broader critical consciousness of different kinds of embodiment of the material world.
7. I refer here to Tsing (Citation1993), but am also responding to a recent trend of highlighting indigeneity as a form of promotion for study abroad programs. Here we see the connectivity of ‘Othering’ in the context of national and international/global space.
8. The example of Jessica Alba’s dancing mastery in The Sleeping Dictionary (Citation2003) allows us to unpack the processes of inclusion and exclusion of so-called ‘traditional’ embodied practices in the production of global culture. The film suggests how abundance/scarcity and derived quantitative tropes (preservation, conservation, transmission) frame qualitative discourses on tradition as global South embodied practices travel through globalization. Embodied ‘traditions’ (dance, music, theatre, ritual, fashion, and other gendered/ethnically marked embodied practices) travel in person, as well as through literary and media representations. The production of embodied ‘traditions,’ and the sense of scarcity/abundance of their availability for consumption is generated at the crossroads of multiple cultural industries that respond, not without contradiction, to national and regional politico-economic interests as well as to the interests of the globalized market of ‘the traditional.’
9. Here, I am inspired by Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s critique of post-colonialism This Earth of Mankind (Citation1996), in which he uses literature to examine colonized identity while also being aware of its complicity by participating via the written word.
10. I explain at length how this paradigm works in Larasati (Citation2002).
11. Vale Corporation is a large company that has been operating an open-pit nickel mine and processing plant in Sorowako, on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia since 1968. In conversation with Tania Li’s Land’s End (Citation2014, p. 45), which suggests both the absence of the arts and profound poverty, I argue that the pressure of forced collaboration with industrialization, the creation of factories, and land dispossession change daily bodily language and enforce a standardized visibility of aesthetics. Because aesthetics often function as a form of fluid negotiation, the collaborative mode of bodies in space and the urgency of a resistance project become blurred and also forgotten. The financialization of the event (when the dance was organized, for example) opened the door for the corporation to negate the aim of the bodily practice itself.
12. The map in Devi’s thinking locates the forest as a form of socio-natural and political consciousness, an interrelation between the notion of spatial living habits and human-nature relations (Devi Citation2012).