Childhood, animality and emotions in indonesian film director Edwin’s Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Wants to Fly (2008)

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the ways childhood, animality and emotions are imbricated in the Chinese Indonesian film director Edwin’s film: Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008). By examining their entanglement, it demonstrates how the director’s use of childhood as a trope of becoming externalises the complex configuration of emotions embodied by Chinese in Indonesia. Further, this article explores this configuration as the subjective dimension of Sinophobia, here approached as the historical process of positioning Chinese Indonesians as an object of national disgust. Complementing this analysis, this article also examines Edwin’s employment of a pig-imaginary to visually convey the affective effects of contemporary racism in Indonesia. This article concludes arguing that, by employing both childhood and animality, Blind Pig effectively troubles what Chineseness is by means of visualising how it feels from the embodied perspective of a minoritised diasporic subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Babi buta yang ingin terbang/Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
• Blind Pig Wants To Fly
• Chineseness
• Sinophobia
• Sinophone
• Chinese Indonesian cinema

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the article for their productive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Current affiliation is the Centre for Social Studies (CES), the University of Coimbra.

2. With Sara Ahmed, we critique the affective turn in Cultural Studies as an unnecessary departure from feminist theories of emotions and therefore do not distinguish between the concepts of affect, feeling and emotion. For further details, see Ahmed (2015). The Cultural Politics of Emotions. Second Edition. New York: Routledge.

3. These encompassed an array of practices and beliefs related to what was perceived as the religions of China and today referred to as ‘Confucianism’ and ‘Daoism.’

4. This regulation was mostly likely implemented due to the high number of Muslim Chinese in the colonies. Chinese Muslims claim in fact a long history of presence in the Indonesian archipelago. This can be traced to the fifteenth century, when the Ming dynasty sent maritime expeditions into the region on their way to West (Huan 1970, 93).

5. On the onset of independence, when Indonesia’s representatives signed the Round Table Agreement with the exiting Dutch officials in 1949, all Chinese descendants who failed to reject their Indonesian citizenship by 1951 were automatically granted with double citizenship: Chinese and Indonesian (Chandra 2012, 93–100).

6. Under Sukarno, the experiment of dual citizenship did not last long. By 1995, Indonesia and China signed the Dual Citizenship Treaty, which terminated the possibility of dual citizenship for persons of Chinese descent residing in Indonesia by 1962 (Somers and Ann 1965, 233–234; Coppel 1983, 26–27; Chandra 2012, 90–91).

7. The U.S. military presence in Indonesia entailed the military training of Indonesian army officials in the U.S., with more than 4,000 soldiers trained in that country by 1965 (Scott 1975; Chomsky and Herman 1980, 403n9). This technical training was moreover heavily infused with the propaganda of U.S. ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ alongside the instructions of how they were to be defended worldwide (Mrazek 1978a, 127–128).

8. The term is drawn from author Qiu Zitong’s conversation with Charlotte Setijadi, who interviewed Edwin on 28 December 2012, Sydney.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes on contributors

Maria Elena Indelicato

Maria Elena Indelicato is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), the University of Coimbra. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, and l lectured in Media and Cinema at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University. Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants, she has published in race feminist and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Chinese Cinemas, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Ivana Pražić

Ivana Pražić earned her PhD (2016) from the University of Sydney researching Chinese Indonesian religious politics. As a 2017 Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow (Singapore) she explored the formation of Confucianism as modern religion in Southeast Asia and its relationship with Chinese national identity. Pražić is currently an independent researcher and occasional public lecturer with a number of institutions in Serbia, including the Confucius Institute in Belgrade.

Qui Zitong

Qui Zitong is Associate Professor at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University. She obtained her PhD at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. She has published work on Chinese youth and cinema in Cultural Studies, China Media Report, Oxford Bibliographies and Chinese Cinema. She is currently working on her book, Youth and Chinese Modernity, which will be published by Zhejiang University Press.