Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

2. Rooting and Routing Whiteness in Colonial Indonesia: From Dutch to Japanese Whiteness

Beauty may come in different shapes, but apparently not in different shades. At least this is what images of beauty that circulated in early- to midtwentieth -century Indonesia would seem to suggest. If during the precolonial era the brightness of the moon functioned as an objective correlative for beauty, in early- to mid-twentieth-century Indonesia what appeared on the pages of women ’s magazines were the beautiful faces of different races of women models— Caucasian, Japanese, Indonesian—but all white. Tracing the shifts in beauty ideals during the colonial period, I will focus solely on the emergence of two categories of whiteness: “European whiteness” and“Japanesewhiteness.”Theformationof“Indonesianwhiteness”aspartofthe postcolonialnation’sstruggleinarticulatingitsgenderednationalidentityagainst these “white” colonial powers will be discussed in the next chapter. Here I show howcirculationsofpeopleandideasfromtheNetherlandsandJapanengendered particular beauty ideals in colonial Indonesia and that what counted as light skin throughout these periods differed significantly over time. Examining the historical emergence of these two categories of whiteness, I make visible not only the complex construction of multiple categories of whiteness that emerged as a result of transnational circulations of people and ideas in Indonesia but also the shift that happened during these two colonial periods: from attempts to conflate skin color with race to attempts to dissociate these two categories of identity, and the intricate and subtle ways the ideology of emotion helped shape these processes of identity formation. In the Dutch colonial period thatpeakedduring1900–1942,itwaslight-skinnedCaucasianwomenwhowere RootingandRoutingWhiteness inColonialIndonesia FromDutchtoJapaneseWhiteness 2 From Dutch to Japanese Whiteness : 37 consideredtheepitomeofbeauty.ThisprocessofrepresentingCaucasianwomen as the face of beauty highlights the ways in which racial projects of colonialism were successful in their attempt to conflate skin color with race. I use racial projects here as race scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant define them: “simultaneouslyaninterpretation,representation,orexplanationofracialdynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines” (1994, 56; emphasis original). This conflation between skin color and race was meant to create a distinct white skin color/racial category in which only Caucasians would be positioned in the white skin color/racial category. An example fromthelate-eighteenth-centuryChinesecontextmighthelpexplainthisbetter: although up to that period both Chinese and Europeans had been considered “whites,” Europeans argued that their “superiority” over the Chinese must mean they had different skin colors. Europeans then claimed to be the sole possessor of white skin and designated yellow as the color of Chinese skin (Demel 2001, 36). In colonial Indonesia, the process of marking Europeans as the only racial group that could occupy the racial/skin color “white” category was only successful in beauty discourse, however. Beyond beauty discourse, the boundary of who could be considered racially white and white-skinned was unclear; racial projects that were implemented in colonial Indonesia actually produced a white racial category that only partly relied on skin color as its signifier. It is crucial that the particularity of the Indonesian experience of racial formation under colonialism be noted. During this period, some dark-skinned Javanese could request and be granted “European equivalence”; the Japanese were even regarded as “honorary Europeans.” Both examples demonstrated how the boundary of the white skin color/racial category was anything but definitive. Thismessyracialandskincolorconfigurationwasfurthercomplicatedwhen Japanesecolonization(1942–1945)challengedtheCaucasianwhitebeautyideal. Not only did the Japanese challenge the Caucasian white beauty ideal by replacing it with an Asian one, but they also challenged the belief that Caucasians were the sole possessors of white skin by claiming that Asians could appropriate and even own white skin. It is important to remember that although in the United States the word yellow has been used to signify “Asian” race, Asians have used other words to describe their skin color. The Japanese, for example, use the word “shiroi,” which means white and is the same word used for white paper and snow, and white skin color in general, to describe their own skin color (Wagatsuma 1967, 411). This notion that Asians could also possess white skin color underscores the ways in which skin color was dissociated from race: people could have white skin color but they did not necessary belong to the white racial group. This attempt to dissociate race from skin color, however, failed in practice because the Japanese own understanding of skin color at the time was already one that was 38 : Chapter 2 infused with Western white ideals—the dissociation of race from skin color, as I will discuss in chapter five, was more successful in post-Independence Indonesia. To provide a...