Books by Doreen Lee
In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indones... more In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists' experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present.
Papers by Doreen Lee
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Apr 27, 2015
This essay draws attention to the emergent modes of urban sociality and circumscribed mobility th... more This essay draws attention to the emergent modes of urban sociality and circumscribed mobility that define the lives of traffic-stricken residents in the megacity of Jakarta, Indonesia. I argue that Jakarta traffic has exceeded the scale and discourse of a technopolitical problem of failed infrastructure; rather, the systemic and rhizomic nature of traffic provides the temporal infrastructure that governs the flow of living and leisure, and the patterning of individual desires and struggles in urban Indonesia. I use the term “absolute traffic” to convey the limit-horizon of gridlock as a set of exhausting physical and psychic states that urban residents survive daily. Despite such overwhelming challenges to mobility, particularly for the city’s underprivileged populations, I argue for an agentive perspective of absolute traffic in which forms of play, negotiation, and disruption form important moments for the public display of infrastructural aptitude. Strategies for surviving and engaging with absolute traffic emerge in ephemeral sites of finely-attuned traffic subjectivity – in the sociality of strangers, the political demonstrations of activists, the growing citizen journalism for traffic reports on radio shows and social media sites, and finally, in the artistic sensibility of artists captivated by the vernacular forms of urban chaos.
This article is currently free to download as an Editor's Choice paper on ijurr.org
Journal of Asian Studies, Mar 23, 2015
Activist art and political resistance became popular aesthetics in the work of Indonesian artists... more Activist art and political resistance became popular aesthetics in the work of Indonesian artists after the fall of the New Order in 1998. In subsequent years, more art alternatives have emerged in cities and small towns across Indonesia, including diverse and vernacular modes of artistry such as street art and community-based international festivals. Where artists formerly focused their energies on critiquing the state, present art initiatives have become far more diffuse, counter-establishment, and localized in their approach. Local artists started the Jogja mural movement to rebrand Yogyakarta as a city of murals, while Jatiwangi Art Factory, an arts collective founded in a semi-industrialized village in West Java, has become a haven for performance arts and community-based projects for Indonesians and foreign artists in residence. This article looks at such experiments of legibility and presence as a new means of redefining publics and broadening the domain of political participation in Indonesia.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Jakarta and Yogyakarta, this paper investigates ... more Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Jakarta and Yogyakarta, this paper investigates the recent surge in the production and circulation of street art through technology and media in post-New Order Indonesia. The global style of street art communicates how public space and the street have become emblematic of changing discourses of individual rights, urban aesthetics, and the practice of citizenship in urban Indonesia. While the history of Western graffiti as a form of defacement and resistance continues to exert a powerful hold on the imagination of Indonesian street artists, I argue that the vernacular meaning of street art and graffiti refuses an easy bifurcation of public and private spaces, while blurring the lines between commercial and cultural urban interventions. [Indonesia, street art, graffiti, media, citizenship]
Journal of Urban History, 2011
History and Anthropology, 2011
Book Reviews by Doreen Lee
Pacific Affairs, 2015
over the past century. Harris' book is both a long overdue contribution to the literature on the ... more over the past century. Harris' book is both a long overdue contribution to the literature on the Cambodian genocide and an ambitious study that reminds us of the resilience of Buddhism in Cambodia-even to those who sought so fervently to eradicate it.
Visual Anthropology, 2007
once the stu of politics in the Dutch East Indies, not only for the men whose individual interpre... more once the stu of politics in the Dutch East Indies, not only for the men whose individual interpretations of those dreams have survived in the pantheon of Indonesian historiography, but also for women who were "awakened" by the close of the nineteenth century. Yet we do not know much about the women: who they were, whether their aspirations were the same as or diverged from their "nationalist brothers," or even when and where they could be identified as nationalists in their own right.
Strassler's first book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, tr... more Strassler's first book, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, traces the history of popular practices and aesthetics of photography in Java, spanning the late colonial era to the present. Upon further reveal, however, the book is much more ambitious and political in its intention. Refracted Visions is about the cultivation of visual, technological, and political norms and attachments that allowed the state to identify individuals as state subjects, but, more importantly, allowed individuals to recognize themselves as modern Indonesians. As an ethnography of popular culture, art history, and social history, the book is rare, even unique in the field of Indonesian studies. Perhaps the most likely analytical comparisons that can be made would be Ann Stoler's work on memory, race, and desire in the late colonial era, 1 and Rudolf Mrázek's Wittgensteinian account 2 of late colonial modernity as a dreamscape of technology. 3 Refracted Visions satisfies a gap in the literature of Asian art history and technological studies by charting the slow and formative impact of photography as a distinct enframing device for Indonesian identity.
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Books by Doreen Lee
Papers by Doreen Lee
This article is currently free to download as an Editor's Choice paper on ijurr.org
Book Reviews by Doreen Lee
This article is currently free to download as an Editor's Choice paper on ijurr.org