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“Where are you from?” a fellow scholar politely asked me. A bit of small talk seemed appropriate: we were shoving our belongings into the lockers of KITLV library in Leiden, the Netherlands. It was the summer of 2006. I was then a graduate student doing research for my dissertation. “Well, I live in Canada, but I go to school in the United States; this summer, I am staying with my sister in France. So, where should I say I am from?” I playfully threw the question right back at him, purposefully omitting “Indonesia” in my answer to subtly hint at and expose the complexity and racial undertone of his question, although I then realized that I sounded pretentious in the process. “But where are you from, originally?” he then asked. I smiled, knowing that that question was coming: my “race” could not be traced back to these places. “Indonesia,” I finally said with the answer I thought would satisfy his curiosity. Yet, he refused to let that be my final answer and asked another question, “But you didn’t grow up in Indonesia, did you? Your accent, it’s not Indonesian.” This time it was my accent that seemed to betray my race, my face, and my “place of origin.” “I was born and raised in Indonesia. I don’t know how I got this accent. Perhaps I watch too much American television,” I jovially answered before excusing myself—“Nice meeting you.” I gently closed my locker door and courteously ended the small talk. The talk was indeed “small” and woven into the mundane conversation of our daily lives. But it is one that I have to endure, relentlessly, over and over again. It is a question that reminds me that my body doesn’t belong in certain spaces, for this question exposes the underlying and unspoken assumption that IndonesianWhiteBeauty SpatializingRaceand RacializingSpatialTropes 3 Indonesian White Beauty : 61 “you’re not from here,” from which the question “where are you from?” then logically follows. In other words, this question appears when there seems to be an uneasy disjuncture between the space, face, and race that the body-in-space exhibits. Hence, the question “where are you from?” brings to the surface both the relationships and tensions between places and racial categories and the ways in which bodies in motion and emotions expressed through these bodies become the link that glues the two categories of place and race together. Simultaneously, the question “where are you from?” also exposes the desire to attach meanings to the otherwise racially/spatially illegible bodies and to locate the body-in-space on some existing map of racial categories. Beyond exposing the link between space and race, the question “where are you from?” also gets at a deeper and more theoretical question that feminist studies scholar Elspeth Probyn has asked, “What is it that drags upon us as we move through space? How are different spaces historically formulated as conducive to some subjectivities and not others?” (2003, 290). Questioning this stickiness between subjectivities and spaces is important because such an attachment is problematic: as sociologist Nadia Kim pointed out, for example, the space of Asia has been a signifier that sticks to Asian American bodies and as such, she argues, Asian Americans continue to experience racism because of their association with “Asia” (2008, 5). I am interested in charting the ways in which space and its spatial tropes, articulated through political, geographical, and emotional discourses, become “imperative” signifiers for people’s subjectivity particularly at moments of circulations and encounters across different geographical boundaries. This chapter therefore builds on, albeit departs from, studies that look at the importance of space in the formation of subjectivity (Tuan 1974/1990; Cosgrove 1984; Daniels 1993; Kinsman 1995, 301; Berg and Kearns 1996, 103; Kusno 2000, 211; Appadurai 2003, 342; Harvey 2009, 170) in that it locates such a concern within the specific discourse of emotions. I thus ask: how do circulations and representations of emotions about (transnational) spaces function to construct a specific racial, skin color, and gendered subjectivity in post-independence Indonesia? I answer this question by closely reading beauty (mostly skin-whitening creams and cosmetics) advertisements published in women’s magazines after independence was achieved. These magazines include the Dutch women’s magazines De Huisvrouw in Indonesie (1949) and De Huisvrouw (1951, 1954–1956), and the Indonesian language women’s magazines Dunia Wanita (1952, 1956– 1957), Ketjantikan (1953), Wanita (1949–1953, 1956–1957), Pantjawarna (1948, 1957–1959), Puspa Wanita...

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