Undoing ruination in Jakarta: the gendered remaking of life on a wasted landscape

ABSTRACT

This intervention shares images and stories from the women evictees in Jakarta who collectively give voice to the psychic, physical, and material injuries inflicted by state dispossession in the city. Engaging Ann Laura Stoler's (2013) language to expose the politics of ruination and preservation, we illustrate the gendered nature of the remaking of life on the most wasted of urban landscapes. The focus of this piece is Kampung Akuarium, a neighborhood violently evicted in April 2016 as part of a broader evictions regime in Jakarta under the governorship of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, popularly known as Ahok. In the aftermath, Kampung Akuarium became the most restive of Jakarta's landscapes as residents returned to make claims for justice and compensation, and to remake their lives directly on the rubble of their old homes in defiance of the city government. Flanked by the preserved warehouses of the VOC, the ruined neighbourhood ultimately became a site where colonial histories, state- and capital-inflicted expropriation and ruination, and gendered forms of injury and struggle all found material modes of expression alongside one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Jakarta
• Indonesia
• forced evictions
• ruination
• Kampung Akuarium
• Ahok
• VOC
• occupation
• dispossession
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lisa Tilley is a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and will begin a Leverhulme Fellowship in September 2017. She has published work in relation to debates within political economy, political ontology and post/decolonial thought.

Juanita Elias is Reader in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Her interests center on feminist IPE and development. With Lena Rethel, she is co-editor of The Everyday Political Economy of Southeast Asia (2016).

Lena Rethel is Associate Professor of International Political Economy at the University of Warwick, with a research focus on Southeast Asia. She is a 2017–18 Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and was a 2016–17 Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University.

Notes

1. A Makassar schooner (also known as pinisi) is a particular type of sailing vessel, usually with two masts, which is typically made in Sulawesi.

2. All names of women occupiers interviewed for this project have been changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the British Council's Newton Fund for Institutional Links [Grant Number 217195589].