Flâneur, Popular Culture and Urban Modernity: An Intellectual History of New Order Jakarta

ABSTRACT

Using as a prism the symbiosis between flânerie and the consumption and production of popular culture, this article reconstructs the intellectual history of Jakarta’s encounter with economic modernisation under Indonesia’s New Order (1966–98). By analysing the life of novelist Teguh Esha (b. 1947) and his Ali Topan trilogy, the article highlights the popularly held ideas that mirrored and modulated Jakarta’s experience of New Order modernisation. These ideas suggest that, as a way of life and a system of government, the New Order failed to produce a modernity where people could feel at home. What it summoned into being in Jakarta was a modernity with “flies in the ointment”, such as social alienation, an overpowering sense of homelessness, unbridled corruption, general moral collapse and prostitution in various professions. Rejecting the New Order’s pragmatic modernism, a section of the city’s urban youth put together and practised ideological modernism, which manifested itself in Islamic revival, Muslim pop and heterodox Islam.

KEYWORDS:

• Flâneur
• flânerie
• popular culture
• popular fiction
• urban modernity
• Jakarta
• New Order Indonesia
• Teguh Esha
• intellectual history

Acknowledgments

Constructive comments and editorial assistance from Michael Barr, David Hundt, Robbie Peters, Anne Platt and two anonymous reviewers helped improve this manuscript.

Notes

1. The following biographical sketch of Teguh Esha draws partly on Karsono (2013, pp. 567–573).

2. For a historical comparison, see the riveting ethnographic portraits of post-New Order figures of Indonesian modernity in Barker and Lindquist (2009).

Additional information

Funding

An Australian Government Endeavour Postdoctoral Award (2016) and a Sejong University New Faculty Grant (2018) supported research for this work.