Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

Introduction: Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

In Indonesia, light skin has been the desirable color for as long as we can document. As this book will make clear, in some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literature, such as the epic poem Ramayana, adapted in the late ninth centuryfromitsIndianorigin ,light-skinnedwomenwerethedominantbeautynorm of the time. In both the Indian and Indonesian versions of Ramayana, beautiful women are described as having white shining faces, like the full moon. One thousand years later during the early twentieth century when Dutch colonialism fully matured in Indonesia, images of Caucasian white beauty were used to illustrate the epitome of beauty in advertisements published in women’s magazines. When Japan took over as the new colonial power in Indonesia from 1942 to 1945, they propagatedanewAsianbeautyideal,butwhiteremainedthepreferredskincolor. In postcolonial Indonesia, particularly since the late 1960s whenthepro-AmericanpresidentSoehartoreigned ,Americanpopularculturehasbecomeoneofthe strongestinfluencesagainstwhichanIndonesianwhitebeautyidealisarticulated and negotiated. These transnational circulations of beauty ideals throughout different historical periods have undoubtedly helped maintain the light-skinned preference and configure not only beauty, but also racial, gender, and skin color discoursesinIndonesia.Thepopularityofskin-whiteningproducts—rankedfirst amongallrevenue-generatingproductsinthecosmeticsindustryinIndonesia—is further evidence of such light-skinned preference. I will trace these circulations of beauty images from different countries to Indonesia from precolonial to postcolonial periods and explain how transnational circulations of beauty ideals help shape the construction of race, gender, Introduction SeeingBeauty,SensingRacein TransnationalIndonesia 2 : Introduction and skin color in Indonesia. Moreover, I offer a fresh perspective on the transnational construction of categories of identity by telling this story through the lens of “affect” and emotion. By affect, I refer to philosopher Teresa Brennan’s definition of the term as the “physiological shift accompanying a judgment” (2004, 5). It is how the body cringes at the sight of a feared subject or jolts as it catches a glimpse of a beautiful being. Understanding when, how, and why bodies feel certain affects toward specific bodies allows us to understand the larger social structures within which the meanings of these bodies and their responses make sense.Inessence,thisbookisatheoreticalexplorationofthewaysinwhichhuman emotionsaremadevisibleinandcirculatedthroughtherepresentationsofbeauty images that travel across different geographical locations and how they help shape discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, and skin color transnationally. Thus, I will pay careful and critical attention to how ideals of beauty that travel transnationally circulate “feelings” about people of specific race, skin color, and gender. It is through these feelings that meanings of race, gender, and skin color are registered. Anchoring my analysis in theories of affect and feminist cultural studies of emotions, I argue that race, gender, and skin color are affectively constructed. Pointing out the importance of feelings, senses, and affects in the processes of subjectivity formation in a transnational context, this book furthers our current understanding of race, gender, and skin color as visually and socially constructed. Seeing and Sensing “Seeing is believing,” the old saying goes. And even a postmodern philosopher such as Judith Butler who complicates the phrasing of the simple adage (“the visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation , an episteme, hegemonic and forceful”) would agree on the importance of a visual field in our claim “to know” (1993, 17). According to both versions, the production of knowledge (and racial formation), or, perhaps, “truths,” is inseparable from the structures within which our visual apparatus interprets the visual field, manipulated as it may be. Scholars have argued that for people without visual impairments, vision is the most developed and most important faculty of all human senses; humans are visually oriented (Tuan 1974/1990, 6; Blauert 1983 quoted in Rodaway 1994, 92).Beingseen,however,canbeadouble-edgedsword.Althoughfeministsoperate under the premise that “being seen” is politically advantageous and desirable, race and feminist cultural studies scholars Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey caution that being seen may also lead to the unwanted effect of surveillance (Ahmed and Stacey 2000, 16).1 Introduction : 3 Like seeing, sensing is also an epistemic apparatus. Sensing provides us with the means through which we make sense of the “real” world and how to live in it (Rodaway 1994, 7; Davidson 2003, 92). Geographer Paul Rodaway defines senses2 as: not merely passive receptors of particular kinds of environmental stimuli but . . . actively involved in the structuring of that information and . . . significant in the overall sense of a world achieved by the sentient. In this way, sense and reality are related. (1994, 4) Thus, senses, as a critical apparatus in the process of knowledge production and subjectivity formation, “provid[e...