Project MUSE®: Indonesia - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Indonesia.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USNo. 93 (2012) through current issueLatest Articles: IndonesiaTWOProject MUSE®Indonesia2164-86540019-7289Latest articles in Indonesia. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Foreword
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988794
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The idea of creating this festschrift in honor of Jeff Hadler was conceived on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the founding history of Southeast Asian studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1954–2024), a historical milestone of Southeast Asian studies that includes Jeff's contributions during his fifteen years in service to the campus.Jeff Hadler was a versatile intellectual in so many ways: an accomplished scholar, teacher, mentor, administrator, and library advocate. He supported a generation of students, many of whom are left with his quips, sayings, and advice, imparting the same for their own students. As a colleague and friend, he was human in his mistakes, valiant in the moments
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallForeword2026-04-30text/htmlen-USForeword2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®29312026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30A Festschrift Honoring Professor Jeff Hadler: The Formative Years
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988795
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We are far more than coauthors. When it comes to matters of Jeff Hadler, we are consummate "collaborators." We are Jeff's parents. Jeff was born when Carol was a newly minted social worker at Boston Children's Hospital and Nortin a fourth-year Harvard medical student. The choice to start a family just seemed "right": we were married for a couple of years, the finances were feasible, our professional adventure was well underway, so why not? It was a brilliant guess. This very bright-eyed little boy, soon joined by an equally appealing sister, comprised a tight family unit that was a match for our peripatetic training years in Boston, Bethesda (MD), and then London where he was enrolled in the local state elementary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallA Festschrift Honoring Professor Jeff Hadler: The Formative Years2026-04-30text/htmlen-USA Festschrift Honoring Professor Jeff Hadler: The Formative Years2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®72252026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Minangkabau in Southeast Asian Art History: Alam and Nashar's Night Letters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988796
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In the United States, the field of Southeast Asian art history remains limited. When in 2012 I began to search for doctoral programs where I might continue my study of Indonesian modern and contemporary art, I confronted a reality that I came to understand as rooted in the history of this field of study. For decades, survey courses on Asian art rarely mentioned Southeast Asia. When it was included, it was usually in passing or, as Nora Taylor suggests, as an "afterthought" situating the field in relation to objects that were somehow associated with the Indian subcontinent.1 This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s as some of the first dissertations on Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art were published.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallMinangkabau in Southeast Asian Art History: Alam and Nashar's Night Letters2026-04-30text/htmlen-USMinangkabau in Southeast Asian Art History: Alam and Nashar's Night Letters2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®412692026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Places Like Home: Reminiscing About Jeffrey Hadler's Historical Trajectory as an Indonesianist and Minangkabauist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988797
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San Francisco International Airport (SFO), January 11, 2017. It was past 6 p.m. Pacific Time when I finally landed on a stormy winter evening in the Bay Area. Despite the melancholy, gloomy weather and exhaustion after a half-globe's airplane journey, I was supposed to be elated, as I would be back in Berkeley soon to see my exceptional adviser and friend, Professor Jeffrey Alan Hadler, and to be ready to work on my dissertation with him. Jeff was particularly excited about my return to Berkeley, partly because he had suggested and recommended my thesis topic, and I brought ample data from my extended and challenging fieldwork in Southeast Asia.However, I was concerned and worried because Jeff had a severe illness
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallPlaces Like Home: Reminiscing About Jeffrey Hadler's Historical Trajectory as an Indonesianist and Minangkabauist2026-04-30text/htmlen-USPlaces Like Home: Reminiscing About Jeffrey Hadler's Historical Trajectory as an Indonesianist and Minangkabauist2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®523872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Time's Up, Academia: Shifting Discourse, Reporting, and Mentorship
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988798
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In the spring of 2017, I took my first class in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley: an introductory undergraduate course on the histories of island Southeast Asia taught by Professor Jeffrey Hadler. I remember attending class in awe of the seventy-odd minutes he would spend lecturing from no more than a single 8.5" × 11" sheet of paper. I developed a drive to be like him someday: knowledgeable of Southeast Asia, eloquent, and what looked like seven feet tall.From that semester onward, Professor Hadler encouraged my studies in the department. He scolded my grade-grubbing, remarking that I made an unsavory impression on him when I demanded to know why I had
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallTime's Up, Academia: Shifting Discourse, Reporting, and Mentorship2026-04-30text/htmlen-USTime's Up, Academia: Shifting Discourse, Reporting, and Mentorship2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®329322026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Remembering Jeff
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988799
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Jeff embodied the best of the profession, a true scholar-teacher.My first memories of Jeff precede my meeting him. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, I took Asian Studies 10, a survey course on Asia from antiquity to the present day, where Jeff was a guest speaker. I still remember sitting in the lecture hall, listening to him sharing his research on the Minangkabau, and hearing his impassioned appeal to undergraduates to consider joining the South and Southeast Asian Studies (SSEAS) major. This is a discipline that has produced a lot of important scholarship, Jeff said, alluding to the vast fieldwork and theories by Southeast Asianists that have left an outsized imprint on the social
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallRemembering Jeff2026-04-30text/htmlen-USRemembering Jeff2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®62942026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Teaching Southeast Asian Studies: Peoples and Cultures of Island Southeast Asia
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988800
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What is this course about? This course will provide a solid background to Southeast Asian perspectives, with focus on Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. We will be thinking about why modern Southeast Asia is the way it is, what kind of forces are at play in the notion of Southeast Asia, and what has shaped the nations of Southeast Asia. Different political and cultural identities and thinking will inform our approach to thinking comparatively within the field of Southeast Asian Studies and with priority given to reading primary source materials whenever possible.As a graduate student pursuing my master's and doctoral degrees in UC Berkeley's Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, I had the distinct
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallTeaching Southeast Asian Studies: Peoples and Cultures of Island Southeast Asia2026-04-30text/htmlen-USTeaching Southeast Asian Studies: Peoples and Cultures of Island Southeast Asia2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®581692026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Amid the Dialectical Field of Southeast Asian Voices: A Note on Jeffrey Hadler's Method
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988801
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Jeffrey Hadler harbored a compulsive obsession with nonstandard archives and amateur collections, which provide invaluable sources for unofficial knowledge that supplement, enrich, or resist official narratives. His passion was consistently evident, and one could not help but notice it. In his "post-fieldwork rantings," Jeff reflected that "one of the best ways to get Indonesian students to question the cultural 'truths' promulgated by the current regime would be to show them the changing nature and constructedness of even more essential truths—the form of family life and the idea of home."1 Considering some superficial efforts aimed at epistemic decolonization in recent years, "native" scholars would sufficiently
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallAmid the Dialectical Field of Southeast Asian Voices: A Note on Jeffrey Hadler's Method2026-04-30text/htmlen-USAmid the Dialectical Field of Southeast Asian Voices: A Note on Jeffrey Hadler's Method2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®215762026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Sentimental History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988802
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The first time I met Jeff, I already knew he had a great sense of humor. He treated me to lunch at an Indonesian restaurant called Jayakarta. I intended to sit by the glass window to see the crowded downtown Berkeley for the first time."Do you want to sit here," Jeff said to me in Indonesian, "or over there," Jeff pointed at a seat by the glass window, "so we can be a window display?"I smiled and sat with Jeff in the middle of the room.After that, I paid close attention to what Jeff said, because criticism was often hidden behind his humor. And, since then I became accustomed to laughing while thinking, or thinking while laughing.That is the Jeff that I—and we—know well. To remember him, I wrote a book titled Cari
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallSentimental History2026-04-30text/htmlen-USSentimental History2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®207412026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Reflecting on Jeff Hadler
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988803
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Jeff loved to tell stories—parables, really. So much of his wisdom, and lighthearted cheekiness, passed through these narratives. Two lessons in particular stick in my mind. When Jeff was in school, he thought at first that other students and professors were just faking their expertise. He thought they were all just blowing steam and that the way to go was through shortcuts. Eventually, however, he realized that no, in fact, some experts actually did know seemingly everything, and that the only way to achieve this was through extremely hard work. So, he dedicated himself to that hard work. As he said, one must actually read everything, take notes, try to synthesize and internalize, work on language skills, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallReflecting on Jeff Hadler2026-04-30text/htmlen-USReflecting on Jeff Hadler2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®45572026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30From West Sumatra to the Wider World: Minangkabau Networks and Jeff Hadler's Intellectual Journey as a Historian, Southeast Asianist, and Academic Mentor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988804
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From November 1926 to January 1927, a series of insurrections broke out in several districts across the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), currently Indonesia. Beginning in the capital city of Batavia, the revolt soon spilled over to the rural areas of the nearby Banten region and finally reached the West Coast of Sumatra at the turn of the year. Behind the movement was the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), the earliest communist party in Asia. Without adequate coordination, the rebellions played out in a highly disorganized manner. Unsurprisingly, the Dutch authorities crushed each insurrection within a few days. The revolts gave the NEI authorities the ideal justification for full-scale suppression of the PKI and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallFrom West Sumatra to the Wider World: Minangkabau Networks and Jeff Hadler's Intellectual Journey as a Historian, Southeast Asianist, and Academic Mentor2026-04-30text/htmlen-USFrom West Sumatra to the Wider World: Minangkabau Networks and Jeff Hadler's Intellectual Journey as a Historian, Southeast Asianist, and Academic Mentor2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®218872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30Jeff Hadler: An Everlasting Impact on Southeast Asia Stewardship
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988805
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On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, (1954–2024) and my thirty years of Southeast Asia curatorship at the South/Southeast Asia Library, I would like to take this opportunity to share my fond memories of working with Professor Jeffrey Hadler (1968–2017) for fifteen years during his tenure at the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies of UC Berkeley.I first met Jeff as a classmate at Cornell University graduate school before we became colleagues at UCB in fall 2001. He was one of the very rare faculty members who was always generous with his time and subject expertise for Southeast Asia library acquisitions or any
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/553/image/coversmallJeff Hadler: An Everlasting Impact on Southeast Asia Stewardship2026-04-30text/htmlen-USJeff Hadler: An Everlasting Impact on Southeast Asia Stewardship2026-04-302026TWOProject MUSE®163522026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-30