The Appearances of Memory: Mnemonic Practices of Architecture and Urban Form in Indonesia (review)

In 2000 Abidin Kusno published Behind the Postcolonial. In the earlier book he had explored how colonial representations in architecture and urban space had been re-invented in postcolonial Indonesia, the political and cultural substrata to such an enterprise and the place of memory in the context of such representations. At one level the present book does the same, except that this is now 2010 and, in the life of Indonesia, an entirely different age. The memories are different.

The completion of such a major project as the earlier book inevitably leaves something of a vacuum in an author's mind, especially when the scholarly focus remains relatively unchanged — what do I write next? Kusno's answer was a sequence of illuminating essays, in journals and edited volumes, to push the previous methodological and theoretical themes further. Instead of the earlier grand scale of great cities (most notably Jakarta), their great monuments and spaces, and their great leaders, the essays took more to the minutiae of architecture and the spaces and lives of the city — Jakarta, Governor Sutyoso and cleaning up the city, a "retro" university building, memories of colonial orderliness, a mosque, a guardhouse. The present book, a decade after the first, brings a number of these essays together. So, in that sense, it is a collection.

To attempt a coherent collection of one's earlier work, however, presents a challenge: what, precisely, was it all about? What did it amount to?

Kusno attempts to address this question in a long Introduction where he proposes four themes which, in turn, are used as labels to the four groupings of the chapters. So there are: (1) "Governmentality", concerned with the official use of architecture and urban manage-ment in the post-Soeharto era to reinforce some new sense of social and political behaviour (new "democratic" manipulation); (2) "Remembering and forgetting", on architecture's ability or otherwise to trigger memory, most notably of one's own historical violence against others as one small step towards reconciliation; then (3) "Reminiscences", re-thinking the colonial past, its destruction of old hierarchies and imaginings, and the violent construction of images of non-violence and normalcy; finally (4) "Mental nebulae" which, despite the somewhat opaque title, deals with colonial and postcolonial hang-overs to institutions of the everyday — the mosque and the guardhouse.

At an intellectual level this Introduction is useful. It is able to articulate links between architecture and urban space, power, the myth of order, and memory. It also brings in the idea of different "times" — an "age in motion", "age of normalcy", revolution, then successive regimes. Most useful of all, it exposes the author's difficulty in articulating his guiding hypothesis; the nearest we get might be on page 10: "It is memory's demand for representation from buildings ... coupled with the impossibility of memory being adequately represented that makes the interplay between memory and architecture both beneficial and problematic." At the level of its writing, however, this Introduction is not a happy read: Kusno is too preoccupied with writing about his intentions and concerns; there are too many words, it seems self-indulgent and Kusno really fails to engage the reader. To repeat, the Introduction is useful and important to the book; it is not, however, an easy read.

Nine chapters follow the Introduction. While opacity of writing also occasionally afflicts the essays, here there are good stories to elevate them. They provide new information and, for readers on Indonesia and especially on Jakarta, they have real value. Of the nine chapters, six are based on the earlier essays. The three new chapters are in part to plug gaps and in part to "round out" the account.

A difficulty always besets such reprises of earlier writings. Chapter 1, for example, returns in 2010 to an essay, seemingly unamended, from 2004. It deals with Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso's faltering endeavours at bringing order to a city...