Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region

8 Negotiating Boundaries and Alterity: The Making of a Humanities Scholar in Indonesia, a Personal Reflection

8 NegotiatiNg BouNdaries aNd alterity the Making of a Humanities scholar in indonesia, a Personal reflection Melani Budianta As an academician who teaches American literature and researches Indonesian literature and cultural studies, I have been accustomed to switching fields and exploring new territories. Yet, to write a chapter in a book on Southeast Asian Studies scholarship is like trespassing into somebody else’s terrain — an awkward condition, which is not unfamiliar in my personal as well as professional history. I have internalized this disciplinary interpellation of asking myself “what right have you to be here”. I remember my days as a graduate student at Cornell in the early 1990s, sneaking into James Siegel’s and Benedict Anderson’s famous Southeast Asian studies seminars, while writing my dissertation on the Representation of Otherness in Stephen Crane and the American 1890s. “You really don’t need this course”, said Professor Siegel, who was keen in keeping his class list rather short. Nevertheless, I stayed. Years after returning home, I found my credentials once again questioned. It was during a recess in one of the meetings of the Majlis Bahasa Indonesia/ Melayu and Majelis Sastra AsiaTenggara — a three country (Malaysia-BruneiIndonesia ) intergovernmental body founded to promote Malay language and literature in the region. A Brunei representative looked at me rather closely, politely asking whether I am of Chinese descent. When I answered that I am a Peranakan, he went on to say, “But you must surely be a Moslem, 188 Melani Budianta right?” He was quite incredulous, when I answered negatively, confusing his understanding of what it required to be a national representative of a Malay body. The list of similar experiences is uncannily long. Imagine strolling into a solo painting exhibition in Balai Budaya, one of the most prestigious art galleries in Jakarta in the 1970s, to see a pictorial expression of anger against “the way the Chinese-Indonesian abuses Indonesian language”. (With no other guest around, the artist, from Surabaya, offered generously to lecture me on the subject, seeming quite aware of my physical ethnic affinity with the group he was attacking.) Once, in the mid-1960s, I went to a traditional arts performance with my sisters, where we found ourselves among crowds who, every half-hour, stood up and shouted unfamiliar patriotic yells, looking suspiciously at three timid girls who were awkwardly glued to their seats. Wrong discipline, wrong place, wrong company, wrong ideology, wrong identity, wrong language, but, most blessedly, right timing. Had I lived much earlier, I might have gone berserk. Nowadays we witness the flourishing of scholarly terms such as “hybridity”, “blurred genres”, “transborder identity”, “transnational/translational” condition, and “the postmodern diaspora”, which, not only make sense of, but also valorize, the ambivalent, contradictory, and mismatched positions as “alternative” spaces for artistic creativity as well as political or ideological resistance. However, romanticizing this position theoretically does not make daily life easier. In a time of conflict between Dayak and Madura in the late 1990s, families of mixed marriages suffered prosecution and separation. Before the peace deal of 2005, Acehnese women who initiated All Acehnese Women’s meetings were intimidated by both warring sides, accused of betrayal and treason. In a safer academic zone, a colleague of mine, who is doing interdisciplinary gender studies of indigenous law, had her professorship deferred, because she was considered neither firmly entrenched in the discipline of law, nor sociology. While humanities scholars eagerly embrace deconstructive critical strategy, campus politics as well as cultural politics in Indonesia at the dawn of the twenty-first century keep on drawing rigid boundaries. At the heart of the matter is this constant reworking of relations between theory and praxis, between ways of knowing and the condition of living —which are, at certain moments, complementary, at other moments, contradictory, coloured by gaps and ambiguities. How do the politics of daily life shape knowledge and cultural formation, and vice versa? And how does academic scholarship construct reality at a certain time and place in history? Negotiating Boundaries and Alterity 189 Such complicated questions cannot be thoroughly answered by a microscopic personal account as narrated in this chapter. Moreover, as the accumulated scholarship on “border studies” has indicated, and the accounts of Dr Wong Soak Koon in Chapter Five of this book show, my hybrid personal experience and scholarly position is not at all unique. Besides, one might ask, what relevance does literary and cultural studies work...