(Un)toward Progress: Stories of Modernity and Development in Indonesian Film and Fiction Meghan Downes December 2016 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University © Copyright by Meghan Downes 2016 All Rights Reserved i ‘I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis.' Signed: _________________________________________ Word Count: 83,684 ii Acknowledgements This thesis would never have been possible without generous support and input from so many different people. Firstly, many thanks to my supervisory panel, Ariel Heryanto, Roald Maliangkay, Kirin Narayan and Meera Ashar. Your support, advice, and confidence has been invaluable. To everyone at the School of Culture, History, and Language at The Australian National University – academics, professional staff, students – thanks for providing such a stimulating and supportive environment in which to carry out this project. Special thanks go to Jo Bushby and Harriette Wilson for their ever-helpful administrative support and delicious morning teas. To my fellow research students, especially to my dear Maria Myutel and Evi Eliyanah, it has been a pleasure and an honour to share this journey with you. During my fieldwork in Indonesia, I benefitted immensely from debates, conversations and connections with a wide range of inspiring people. Although not an exhaustive list, my sincerest thanks go out to Rosmah Tami, Meta Kurnia Sari, Arif Rizky, Jalal Basyir, Tini Martodimedjo, and Eta Magno, for your help and your friendship. Thanks also to my host supervisor, Budiawan, from the Media and Cultural Studies department at Gadjah Mada University’s Graduate School. Also, to all my research participants, my warmest thanks for your enthusiasm to get involved in my project and generosity in sparing your time and your thoughts. A scholarship from the Australian government through the Prime Minister’s Australia-Asia Endeavour Award program in 2013 allowed me to spend extended time carrying out my fieldwork, and also provided an opportunity for me to undertake an internship at the Jakarta Post. During 2014-2015, a collaborative project with fellow early career researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany, supported by the DAAD-Go8 Joint Research Co-operation Scheme (between the Australian Group of Eight Universities and the German Academic Exchange Service) really enriched my research outlook. Thanks to my research counterparts Paritosha Kobbe, Mirjam Lücking, Evamaria Sandküler, and Judith Schlehe for some fascinating interdisciplinary conversations and the chance to co-author a joint paper. Throughout my candidature, I prepared several papers for publication in journals and collected book volumes, and the comments received from editors and anonymous iii peer reviewers as I prepared and revised these pieces have undoubtedly resulted in a stronger thesis. Thanks in particular to Campbell Macknight at RIMA, Inaya Rakhmani at Jurnal Komunikasi Indonesia, the editorial team at Plaridel, Roald Maliangkay as guest editor for a special edition of Situations, as well as Koichi Iwabuchi, Dan Black, Olivia Khoo, Kathrina Daud, and Grace Chin for your thoughtful and considered feedback and suggestions. Finally, sincerest thanks to my beloved family and friends. To all my wonderful friends in both Canberra and Melbourne, I am sure you know how much I have appreciated your friendship while I have worked on this thesis. To my parents, Cecily and Terry Downes – in some ways you started me on this road many years ago when you took me on my first trip to Indonesia, aged five. You have been there all the way through the journey, with unwavering love and support, and I have appreciated it immensely. Finally, my deep love and gratitude goes to Michael Stothers, who has been more closely involved than anyone in the highs and lows of this project. Writing a doctoral thesis is a challenging but also incredibly rewarding endeavour, and I have been so lucky to have you by my side to share it. iv Abstract In this thesis, I trace a powerful narrative theme of ‘progress’ across several different genres of storytelling: fictional stories in cinema and literature, audience accounts of everyday consumption practices, and the various stories circulating in media, public debate, and academic scholarship. Stories of progress are pervasive and compelling in contemporary Indonesia, whether in ‘inspirational’ films and novels featuring upwardly mobile young protagonists, or in audience discussions and media debates about the potential of such fictional stories to ‘advance’ and ‘develop’ the nation in both material and moral terms. Central to many of these stories are the keywords ‘modernity’ and ‘development.’ My project seeks to highlight the flexible and unstable iridescence of these keywords as preferred metaphors for interpreting complex social changes, and also the intimate links these terms share with disempowering colonialist and developmentalist discourses around civilisation and linear trajectories of progress. A key premise of this thesis is that words, language, and stories have concrete impacts on our ways of understanding and interpreting the world, and I suggest that uncritical use of opaque terms like ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ can mask deep complexities, reinforce structural inequalities, and erase alternative stories, particularly in postcolonial contexts like Indonesia. My study is informed by critical postcolonial and post-development theory, but I take a cultural studies perspective, focusing on how everyday stories of progress can serve to either challenge or reinforce dominant versions of ‘modernity’ and ‘development.’ Indonesia has a long and fraught history with these terms, and certain versions have attained dominance, coming to structure the narratives of progress circulating within and about Indonesia in the post-reform context. I examine how and why particular versions of progress narratives have become so powerful, where these stories are being most strongly articulated and contested, how these stories have shifted since the demise of the long-powerful New Order regime, and the divergent ways in which central keywords like ‘development,’ and ‘modernity’ operate across different types of stories, including scholarly accounts, public debates, audience discussions, and textual representations. In order to gain a nuanced understanding of what is going on in these stories, I combine close readings of selected popular films and novels, with audience ethnography, and media v discourse analysis. I argue that a deeper understanding of both the pervasiveness and internal contradictions of progress narratives as they are articulated in each of these area can help us, as scholars, to engage more effectively with contemporary identity politics and debates around religion, region, gender, and history in Indonesia, and also to address representational inequalities in the production of knowledge more broadly. As my study demonstrates, the realm of popular culture offers unique insight into these issues, and therefore my thesis contributes not just to Indonesian studies and critical development studies, but also joins important scholarly debates and conversations around the challenges and opportunities of practicing cultural studies in Asian contexts. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction: The trope of progress ............................................................... 1 ‘Modernity’ and ‘development’ in Indonesian identity politics ............................. 13 Theorising popular culture ..................................................................................... 18 Towards a critical cultural studies .......................................................................... 24 Research methods and materials: A multi-modal approach ................................... 28 Structure of the thesis ............................................................................................. 38 Chapter 2 Stories of Scholarship: ‘Modernity’ and ‘Development’ in Academic Discourses .............................................................................................................. 42 Metatheory and master narratives of social science ............................................... 44 Histories of ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ in Indonesia ..................................... 56 Stories of progress in post-reform Indonesian identity politics ............................. 64 Religion: Popular piety, moral censorship, and Islamic modernities ................ 66 Region: Traversing local traditions and national development ......................... 74 Gender: The ‘modern’ family as a microcosm of nation .................................... 80 History: Linear trajectories of development and erasure of state violence ....... 87 Concluding remarks ............................................................................................... 92 Chapter 3 Stories in the Mediascape: Self-help, Censorship, and the Power of Popular Narratives ............................................................................................. 97 Narrative consumption contexts and forms .......................................................... 100 Beyond the pages, beyond the screen ................................................................... 106 Dangerous tales and deregulated censorships .....................................................