Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia by Doreen Lee (review)

Doreen Lee’s vivid and important book, Activist Archives, takes us back to the recent past, the era of activist resistance against the Suharto regime and the reform period that followed. At the center of this history is a modern sort of national hero, the middle-class youth activist of Generation 98. Borrowing from the revolutionary era yet also new, this activist is educated, tech-savvy, itinerant, angry, and stylish. This activist is also keenly aware of the passage of time, compulsively documenting and archiving the present for a future when the moment might feel past. In a global moment of youth social and populist movements, Lee’s analysis provides an urgent and sophisticated map of how political forms fall in and out of salience. A poignant inversion of modernist ideology, Lee’s account depicts a world where it could be reasonable to suggest that Indonesia’s past has become the world’s present.

Lee guides us through Jakarta’s streets, makeshift offices, sleeping quarters, and other urban spaces that activists occupied in their efforts to reclaim early twentieth century nationalist, anticolonial revolutionary zeal for the anti-Suharto struggle. Her approach does more than document, hers is a sensory argument. The transformation of a late 20th-century remaja, with his middle-class tastes or her respectable preferences, into a proper pemuda was executed through not just political courage but aesthetic form. While most Indonesians can instantly recognize the cultural figure known as the activist, Lee takes that assumed knowledge seriously, unpacking small, stylistic details as features of a type of citizen whose creative repurposing of the past and particular subculture was essential to the very real political demands they also made.

A conundrum lay at the heart of the anti-Suharto youth movement: could a pemuda be truly critical of the New Order? Given that pemuda history had been so thoroughly co-opted by the regime’s ideology, a new youth movement could only extend inspiration of the revolutionary past so far, and then would need to create a new, specific identity. Lee’s central argument sensitively relays this condition. The semangat pemuda (or “teen spirit”) Indonesian citizens know so intimately from official history generated a particular affective progeny, what Lee calls “pemuda fever.” Lee situates these examples in theoretical conversation with Jacques Derrida’s concept of “archive fever,” the impulse to “compulsively document, consign, and assemble signs” (11) from the present in preemptive nostalgia for the time when it will be past, driving “… an irrepressible desire to return to the origin” (91).¹ Conceiving of youth activism in this way relays twinned qualities at the heart of Generation 98, the assumption that nationalism is fundamentally a youthful form, and the idea that youth are most open to the sort of radical break with the past that revolution requires. As a result, what appears to be a rejection of history is instead an “incision” into the body politic (15). Ironically, this temporality drove Generation 98 itself into a sort of irrelevance. As reformasi has stalled and as the forms of demonstration and political communication styled as democratic have both normalized and become more militantly conservative, the same activists who were hailed as heroes might now seem ossified and, almost predictably, out of style.

But what were the forms through which activists came to be recognizable? How were their dreams rendered visible, and therefore valuable? How does it feel to be compelled by pemuda fever? Lee takes us through a series of spaces and embodiments to relay the political habitus of the youth activist. Through sympathetic yet critical eyes, she acknowledges what has now become conventional wisdom about the 1998 resistance movement: that it was populated by middle-class, college-educated, globally oriented urban youth. Those facts have all too often come to suggest that these activists were therefore bourgeois and only invested in reform insofar as it affected their class compatriots, rather than dedicated to thoroughgoing social justice. While these...