Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

Conclusion Shades of Emotions in a Transnational Context

As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan articulates, “to strengthen our sense of self the past needs to be rescued and made accessible. Various devices exist to shore up the crumbling landscapes of the past” (1977, 187). This book thus asks that as we construct a transnational history of race, gender, and skin color that we make “emotions” one of these devices. This is because what one remembers reveals the ideology of emotions through which these memories are filtered. The same goes for what one represents and the stories one narrates. Emotions indeed direct not only the questions historians ask, but also the tone and content of the historical narratives they tell. Throughout the book, I have provided fragments of history that take into account rasa, affect, emotion, and feeling. The previous chapters have illustrated how beauty ideals travel and help shape and shift discourses of race, gender, skin color, and beauty in Indonesia from precolonial to postcolonial times. Simultaneously , they have laid out the specific ways in which emotions are attached to representations of beauty images and that it is through these feelings that meanings of racial, gender, skin color, and beauty discourses are registered. In this concluding chapter, I pull all these chapters together and put them in a conversation with each other to explicate the theoretical implications of the book. Researching Emotions, Emotions in Research This book makes a modest request: that we incorporate emotion and its theoretical affiliations such as rasa, malu, affect, feeling, and the senses into our Conclusion ShadesofEmotionsinaTransnationalContext 130 : Conclusion research. Throughout these chapters, I have demonstrated the theoretical stake when we leave out affect theories and cultural studies of emotions as a critical lens in constructing a transnational history of race, gender, and skin color, and what can be gained when we include this lens in our analysis. That is, when we render emotion and its theoretical affiliations important in our analysis, our stories inevitably change. I offer a different route to understanding transnational construction of race, gender, and skin color and how power operates in everyday lives,onethatisenabledbymyengagementwithaffecttheoriesandculturalstudies of emotions and my contextualizing the issue within a transnational context. By incorporating emotion into my research, in chapter one I was able to show how the formation of discourses on race, gender, skin color, and beauty in a transnational context relies on the production of rasa. That is, trails of stories about skin color and race in precolonial Java point us to how feelings toward certain performative subjects and events censor the kinds of history that may be revealed; for whose purposes; and to what ends. Building on the work of scholars of rasa, I define rasa as a dominant emotion felt when encountering performative events and characters that provoke our “affective trajectories” and previously “deposited memory elements“ (Higgins 2007, 47). Such a concept forces us to be mindful of the ways in which emotions matter as we conduct our research. I argue that rasa can and has functioned as an apparatus of censorship in the production of history, and therefore knowledge. Moreover, I point out that rasa alsofunctionedasanapparatusthroughwhichwesenseknowledge—knowledge produced through and not necessarily of feeling. The deployment of rasa in my constructing precolonial history has resulted in my argument that, even prior to the period of European colonization, skin color already mattered in Indonesia and that the beauty ideal around that time was embodied by women with light skin color as is shown in the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, an adaptation of the Indian version. Certainly, during that time, skin color is not yet intersected with race. Although it is clear that various races existed, it is not clear how or whether or not racial hierarchies existed. Moreover, by employing emotion as a device through which I tell my version of history, I point out the ways in which power operates through emotions. During the colonial period, there existed what I call “colonial emotionology.” I define colonial emotionology as the ways in which ideologically permitted emotions as an articulation of the self serve the interests of the colonial empire. Colonialism hinged, in part, on Dutch women’s ability to display signs of white prestige through their emotional and psychological dispositions, governed by “colonial emotionology.” The representations and expressions of emotions in beauty ads during the colonial period are therefore symptomatic of the ways in Conclusion : 131 which colonial ideology and power work in concert with ideologies of emotion, gender...