I. Mobility and the Politics of Appearance, continued

A. Chapter 4: politics of appearance: "Power and knowledge intersect and interact in highly charged contests over who and what may constitute the appropriate and desired look of a place" (138).

1. Visual landscape: houses, fields, people
2. Tourists' visual practices: looking, postcards, photos, videos
3. Visualization is "central to the process of creating knowledge about the self and the other that is inherent in and vital to doing tourism" (135).
4. National media images, ethnic theme parks shape how villagers package themselves
5. Municipal government: preservation programs, building codes

B. Upper Jidao: village of wooden houses

1. New "clothing" in 2005: cover "all concrete sides of the houses that could be seen either from the highway or from the main walking paths" (143).
2. Miao women's dress
3. Film: Anayi, 2006

C. Ping'an: terraced fields

1. Well-known appearance requires constant upkeep
2. Tour guide: tourists should take photos with people in them so they know that these are not naturally occurring
3. Models

a. Internal Orientalism
b. Migrant women
c. Sweet talk
d. Not ethnically Zhuang
e. 2008 Beijing Olympics controversy over children wearing costumes of China's 56 ethnic groups in China

i. International media: fake
ii. Chinese audience: children represented ethnicity in general, not themselves as ethnic persons

f. Migrant models reiterated gender, class, and social status inequality (169)

D. "Photography thus becomes the occasion for creating a familiar and believable shared social relationship between ethnic minorities and mainstream citizens in present-day China by playing to expectations and stereotypes, which could reinforce national discourses of social harmony" (170).

 

II. Photography and Minority Visions

A. Karen Strassler: photography has helped to create modern Indonesian national, community, and individual identity
B. Ibu Soekilah: 1950s studio photos against tropical backdrops
C. Photographs visually (and hence narratively) connect intimate with public or political
D. Strassler, Karen. 2008. "Cosmopolitan Visions: Ethnic Chinese and the Photographic Imagining of Indonesia in the Late Colonial and Early Postcolonial Periods." The Journal of Asian Studies 67(2): 395-432.

1. Chinese photographers: amateur landscape, professional studio
2. Traditional indigeneity and global modernity
3. "Both are settings in which photography is harnessed to the task of envisioning national spaces and subjects in ways that will have ramifications deep into the postcolonial era for how Indonesians envision what it is to belong to this newly formed nation" (396).
4. Chinese Indonesians = outsiders within, cultural mediators of traditional and modern

 

III. Amateur Landscape Photography

A. Landscape photography constructs asli (indigenous) identity
B. Amateur photography clubs had colonial origins
C. 1950s: focus on village landscapes

1. Members = wealthy professionals with assimilated, mestizo lifestyles: spoke Dutch, often Malay and Javanese at home
2. "Hunting" expeditions for photography
3. Stunning, romanticized landscapes with poor, rural, ethnically "Indonesian" inhabitants
4. Romanticist genre of "Beautiful Indies" art
5. Landscape as timeless tradition
6. Club members "hunted" together, exchanged ideas about technical issues, and had internal contests and critiques
7. Image titles = generic, homogenizing, universalizing aesthetic language
8. Clubs might have Javanese members, one of whom might be its president

D. Late 1950s: amateur club activities diminished due to rising anti-Chinese sentiment
E. Late 1970s and 1980s: UNESCO and ASEAN encouraged cultural tourism
F. 1990s: images of authentic Indonesia on tv, billboards, etc.
G. Irony: Chinese Indonesians excluded from the authentic "asli" that they documented and helped to create

 

IV. Studios of Modernity

A. Ibu Soekilah's studio photo: individual materialized longings to be modern
B. Backdrops and props put customers literally into the frame of modernity
C. Studio photographers = Chinese

1. Recent migrants from Canton
2. Skilled working-class tradespeople
3. Chinese in Indonesia were an internally diverse group, rather than undifferentiated "diaspora"
4. Familial networks: equipment, training, money to open family-run studios

D. Backdrops and props

1. Colonial era: imported European backdrops

a. Dutch showed their Europeanness
b. Javanese and Chinese could be part of affluent modernity
c. Bicycles and modern clothing
d. References to idealized China

2. Post-independence: locally painted

a. Natural scenes, but people posed in modern fashions as modern Indonesians
b. Landscape wasn't timeless: modern buildings and natural features
c. Images covered the entire surface

3. 1970s-present: People own cameras, but studios still used for formal portraits and identity experimentation

E. Amateur photography perpetuated nostalgic romanticization of the nonmodern
F. Studio photography made the Beautiful Indies appropriate for modern urbanites
G. Ethnic Chinese role

1. Part of, yet other to nation
2. Malay-speaking, not rooted in traditional communities
3. Seen in terms of indigenist ethnic nationalism as not authentically Indonesian
4. Amateurs: located Indonesianness in primordial claims of ancient traditions that excluded them
5. Studios: fostered outward-looking cosmopolitan vision of global modernity as part of nation

H. Exclusion of Chinese as "other" for their ethnicity, economic role and absence from nationalist historiography --> adept at depicting the nation through aesthetic, technical practice of photography