UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ A LIQUID WORLD: FIGURING COLONIALITY IN THE INDIES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS with an emphasis in VISUAL STUDIES by Raissa DeSmet Trumbull September 2013 The Dissertation of Raissa DeSmet Trumbull is approved: _____________________________ Distinguished Professor Emeritus James Clifford _____________________________ Associate Professor Jennifer González _____________________________ Distinguished Professor Emerita Donna Haraway _____________________________ Assistant Professor Boreth Ly ___________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Raissa DeSmet Trumbull 2013 Contents List of Figures iv Abstract v Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 The Grove 13 The Underwater Body 48 The Underwater Eye 96 Chasing the Goddess 139 The Waves 203 Bibliography 211 iii List of Figures 1. After the Tsunami 13 2. The Poison Tree from Macassar 27 3. The Upas Tree or Poison Tree on the Isle of Java 41 4. Expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio 44 5. A naga at Angkor Wat 93 6. Meditation tower, Kraton Kasunanan, Surakarta 99 7. Nyai Roro Kidul by Basuki Abdullah 107 8. The road to Parangtritis 121 9. Offerings at Parangkusumo 123 10. Conducting a labuhan ritual 124 11. Stone with flower offerings 124 12. Bedhaya Semang, Kassian Cephas 181 13. Waves at Parangtritis, December 2011 210 iv Abstract A Liquid World: Figuring Coloniality in the Indies Raissa DeSmet Trumbull, University of California Santa Cruz This dissertation explores the history of colonial representations of the Dutch East Indies and analyzes the tropes that undergird those representations. The relentless damp of the tropics, it argues, suffuses European evocations of the Indies; from drenched forests and malarial clouds to the lush figure of the concubine, the islands of the archipelago have long been made synonymous with natural abundance and tireless sensuality. As my study demonstrates, these figures are also distinctly feminine, part of the ongoing colonial project to render the tropics yielding and dominable. The dissertation aims not only to demonstrate the endurance of colonial figurations, but also to revalorize the turbid, teeming forms of tropical life that have historically been denigrated. To this end, while the first half of the dissertation is concerned with the colonial period, the latter half analyzes indigenous images of liquidity as gateways to local, Indonesian knowledge. What would it mean, this project asks, to rethink Indonesia’s “liquid world” in terms that originate in the islands, rather than the metropole? To forge an answer to this question, the dissertation develops a new methodological approach. Analyzing regimes of representation, my project is, at its core, tropological. It is concerned with the deep structures of colonial fantasy that endure over time, and in the texture and gender of those structures. And it is v interested in the ways Indonesian imaginaries escape and resist the colonial fantasy. This semiological focus requires taking the figurative seriously, as substance rather than reflective surface, and it means reading materials and material processes as assiduously as texts. My corpus includes botanical writing, literary fiction, painting, and performance. Laying European and indigenous figurations of water, women, and the tropical landscape alongside each other, I track the resonances and tensions between them. This produces a new critical framework for reading representations of the Dutch East Indies, and for understanding the colonial residue that stakes its claims on the bodies of contemporary Indonesians. vi Acknowledgements This work was a truly collaborative effort. It would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions of my dissertation co-chairs and mentors, Jennifer Gonález and James Clifford. Jennifer helped me learn how to yoke the scholarly, the poetic, and the personal; she literally helped me to find my voice, and to imagine a place for myself in the academy. I was and remain endlessly amazed by the generosity of her reading practice, by the way she could inhabit my project and its preoccupations, and offer her own startling insights. Jim championed me and the dissertation from the very beginning, providing astute comments on even the earliest drafts. He never failed to grasp and to language what it was I was getting at, often before I had arrived at the idea myself. I thank him for cups of tea at his kitchen counter, and for reminders not to neglect the body while the mind writes. I could not have completed or even begun this work without the inspiration and support of Donna Haraway; it was in her feminist theory seminar that the project, its scene and its sensations, took shape, and she who recommended that I expand my corpus to include Indonesian cosmologies. I also want to thank Boreth Ly, in whose classroom I learned so much about the visual cultures of Southeast Asia, and met many of the texts and practices that feature in the second half of the dissertation. He was instrumental in helping me arrange a fruitful research trip to Java, and introduced me to my gifted translator, Alan Feinstein. “Translator,” in this case, is a misleading term; Alan is an accomplished scholar and editor in his own right, with deep roots in Yogyakarta. The interviews I conducted about the bedhaya simply would not have vii happened without him. And I want to offer my deepest thanks to the dancers and dance teachers themselves. Gusti Mung, Ibu Suharti, Ibu Tia, and Ibu Linah all gave generously of their time and knowledge, bearing my sometimes naive questions with grace and good humor. They are the real experts, and I will continue to learn from all they shared with me. My dissertation research and writing was supported by a grant from the Institute for Humanities Research. Anne Spalliero, Sheila Peuse, Melanie Wylie, and Marti Stanton provided essential support for me and for this work, going well beyond the call of duty on my behalf. My colleagues and comrades, Carrie Cifka and Matthew Moore offered endless empathy, helping me talk through my ideas and reading my nearly inscrutable “zero” drafts. I would like to thank Dorothy Duff Brown and Eve Eden for their generous, life-saving counsel, without which this project might have been abandoned. Deepest thanks are due to my family for supporting me in this work: Irene DeSmet Burns, Lon Burns, Patricia Goehrig, and Peter Trumbull; and also Samantha Zenack and Marcia Sours, who are my family, too. The debt I owe Rob Trumbull is boundless, an ocean. I could not have persevered without your love, your partnership, your insight, and your patience. And I could not have found the time to write without your help caring for our boy. You are, as ever, my all. Finally, I could not have seen my way through without Eli, who had to be born in order for the words to come, and who always reminds me of what matters. viii . Voor Jeanne en Bert ix Indifference has two aspects: the undifferenciated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved—but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Difference & Repetition All these states of being, perceiving, and doing are expressed by processes that are familiar to us and that have to do with the treatment of materials, pouring, flowing, dripping, oozing out, setting, hardening, coagulating, thawing, expanding, contracting, and the voluntary aspects such as slipping away, advancing, collecting, letting go— Louise Bourgeois, Louise Bourgeois: Destructing the Father, Reconstructing the Father x I fabricated an India . the Indies, we used to say . Marguerite Duras, Woman to Woman xi Diptych I walk around the pond at dusk cut thinking about birds, dice how they grow slice out of the faces of women. flay steam The pond pulls stick through itself in a boil bubbling at its center. braise peel In wide rings it splays mash out to the muddy shoals, gut licking the legs, shell chop the bellies of mallards, beat the retreating tails scald of tadpoles, and their bone clear new green hands. The kitchen The Bird Woman is the room of women’s in her nun’s habit violence. combs the edges of the pond, raking her teeth through the growth. I am sitting in the kitchen watching my mother prepare The geese Singgang Ayam. She shutters down on them behind the reeds. For this recipe the chicken She closes flight. is split down the breast and flattened, marinated, The neck of a young goose runs milk through and simmered in coconut milk. her fist. Finally grilled. If you do not have a pan A cartful of geese lie like spoons. large enough to accommodate a spread-eagled chicken, The bird cries, cut the bird in half. she winds back the head. xii Introduction In a keynote address to the Asian Studies Association in 2005, historian Barbara Watson Andaya called for a new “oceanic scholarship,” one that bridges geographic and disciplinary divisions, and represents an interconnected Asia not subservient to the boundaries of traditional area studies and the modern nation state. Citing rich examples from Southeast Asia’s maritime cultures, she imagined a literature and a pedagogy that redress the scholarly preoccupation with land-based studies, and the dominant historiographic narrative which figures the sea as margin. A Liquid World: Figuring Coloniality in the Indies, formulates one approach to this redress. Departing from images of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, I look back over the history of colonial representations of the Dutch East Indies, analyzing the tropes that undergird those representations. The relentless damp of the tropics suffuses European evocations of the Indies; from drenched forests and malarial clouds to the lush figure of the concubine, the islands of the archipelago have long been made synonymous with natural abundance and tireless sensuality.