Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia by L. Ayu Saraswati (review)

In Indonesia, having fair skin (i.e., light-colored) is a desirable thing for women (and also, to a lesser extent, for men). And fair skin means work: women pull on gloves to ward off the sun before hopping onto their scooters, they refuse to go swimming before the sun is down, and they buy and use one or more of the hundreds of whitening creams and body lotions sold in stores or beauty clinics. Cosmetics companies such as Unilever and L’Oréal have huge Asian markets for skin-lightening creams, and market researchers predict that the demand in Indonesia for skin-whitening products will only grow in the coming years.

Considering the importance of perceived ideals of skin color and the ways in which Indonesians identify and judge other Indonesians by physical features (such as slanting eyes, nose shape, and hair form), it is surprising that there is not a larger body of studies on race in Indonesia. Race is a major topic of academic discussion in accounts of the colonial era, when racial discrimination was a “cornerstone” of colonial rule, and when it was, depending on your viewpoint, a pervasive or elusive aspect of daily life. Thanks to Ann Stoler and to those reacting to and reflecting on her work, we know how difficult it is to pin down the importance of race in relation to other indicators of difference—such as class, religion, or language—and how important it is to do that anyway.¹ Scholars of postcolonial Indonesia have paid less attention to race, partly, perhaps, because of Suharto’s SARA policy, a ban on the public discussion of issues related to ethnic groups, religion, race, and other group-based interests, because they were considered a danger to public order.² Only in studies of the position of people of Chinese descent in Indonesia and in critical studies of Papua has race been a concept of some interest.

Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race is, therefore, a welcome contribution to Indonesian studies, as it looks at the idea of “whiteness” in (the history of) Indonesia. It traces ideas of beauty and skin color and its intersections with race, gender, and emotions from the Ramayana to today’s use of whitening cosmetics. The book is anchored in feminist and cultural studies and affect theory. Through the lens of affect and emotion, ideals of beauty are conceptualized as feelings about people of specific race and skin color. “The act of seeing,” writes Saraswati, is “simultaneously an exercise of sensing” (4). “Sensing” is used here as an umbrella term that includes affect, feelings, and emotions, and it is a useful concept to remind us how prejudices and the longing for unattainable beauty standards are rooted in socially learned emotions.

But those are not the only theoretical tools Saraswati introduces. In what she accurately calls a “tapestry of theories” (9), every chapter features a new conceptual intervention. These are of varying usefulness. In the first chapter it is rasa, “a dominant emotion felt when encountering performative events” (16). In the second it is colonial emotionology, “the ways in which ideologically permitted emotions […] serve the interest of the colonial empire” (47). In the third it is emotionscape, a term devised to highlight the relationship between space and race. In the fourth chapter, virtuality plays a role; and, in the last chapter, malu, meaning approximately shyness, shame, or embarrassment, is the structuring concept.

A great strength of this book, for readers outside Indonesian studies, is its subtle demonstration of how ideals of whiteness in Indonesia differ from those in the United States or Africa (and, moreover, are not simply postcolonial mimicry). As the term “transnational” in the title suggests, ideas about whiteness and beauty traveled, and the locations where ideal beauty was situated also shifted over time. Sarawati’s narrative of these locations takes the reader from the moon (see below) to Europe, and then from the United States to Japan and wider Asia.

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