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Public Culture 15.3 (2003) 503-530



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Public Speaking:
On Indonesian As the Language of the Nation

Webb Keane


In August 1998, an interviewer for an Indonesian news weekly asked Amien Rais, a major figure in national Islamic politics and founder of the National Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional), why he had altered the name of the party from the originally proposed Partai Amanat Bangsa. He replied, "We chose Partai Amanat Nasional because it would be better translated into English as National Mandate Party, not People's Mandate Party. Because the word people in English has leftist connotations" (Amien 1998; English words italicized in the original; translation mine). Of course Amien Rais was making a shrewd political calculation in this bid for international support, but it is striking that he expresses the decision with reference to translation so unapologetically. He seems to find it a perfectly ordinary matter to encounter Indonesian as doubly foreign. Having [End Page 503] been a childhood speaker of Javanese, he already comes to Indonesian as a second language. In addition, he readily imagines it from the perspective of English. Moreover, he has already, and one assumes unself-consciously, incorporated a so-called loan-word, nasional, into the Indonesian, as if in anticipation of this future translation.

Readers of Indonesian print media will be familiar with this pattern of glossing backward that seemingly views the language from the position of a hypothetical English-speaker—or of an Indonesian unsure of his or her words. What does a national language offer that so easily invites its speakers to take a view from afar? Certainly not the values of incommensurable local particularity. A dominant strand of Indonesian language ideology challenges assumptions that nationhood always demands to be naturalized with clear boundaries, stable locations, and deep origins. On the contrary, Indonesian, like perhaps Swahili or Filipino, and in contrast to many national, ethnic, and religiously freighted languages such as French, Gaelic, Hebrew, or Tamil, is not normally depicted as a language of ancient lineage or as a closely guarded cultural property. 1 Nor has any of this seemed to trouble either its promoters or most ordinary speakers, for whom its "modernity" and relatively cosmopolitan character are taken for granted, if sometimes problematic.

The self-conscious modernity and even cosmopolitan claims of Indonesian as a national standard have been inseparable from a certain projection of otherness. This otherness is related to, but ideologically distinct from, the forms of linguistic difference characteristic of, for example, lingue franche, honorific registers, taboo vocabularies, scriptural and high literary languages, or commonplace plurilingualism. Like other linguistic forms, the national standard draws on semiotic features immanent in language per se, which underlie its potential for producing both intersubjectivity and objectification, for being disembedded from and reinserted into particular contexts, for providing speakers with a range of distinctive social "voices," and for mediating their reflexivity. 2 It does so, however, in order to underwrite Indonesian's apparent potential as a superordinate and cosmopolitan language of purportedly anti-"feudal" (feodal) and reconstituted social and political identities. This promise is inseparable from the imaginability of the nation as a project of modernity and from the semiotics of its possible publics, [End Page 504] both domestic and abroad—and it is this promise to which Amien Rais seems to be responding.

The Otherness of the National Language

Indonesian is a language whose ideological value has derived in part from being portrayed to its speakers as a markedly second and subsequent language. If it can seem, in some ways, to demand the sacrifice of one's first language, or at least its relegation to the past, the private, the local, or the subjective, this potential loss often seems to provoke remarkably little mourning: ethnic language politics or revitalization movements have been surprisingly rare in the archipelago. If the national language does not inspire love in all who claim it, this is largely for other reasons, having to do with general paradoxes of national subjecthood and with the specific violence and tedium of an authoritarian state. And this suggests that the history...

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