@article {33110,
	title = {Review ofThe Phantom World of Digul: Policing as Politics in Colonial Indonesia, 1926{\textendash}1941 by Takashi Shiraishi},
	journal = {Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia},
	volume = {179},
	year = {2023},
	pages = {307-309},
	abstract = {More than three decades after the release of his seminal work An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912{\textendash}1926, Takashi Shiraishi finally published the long-awaited sequel, The Phantom World of Digul. Initially conceived with the self-explanatory title An Age of Normalcy, the monograph draws a sharp contrast with its prequel by investigating the interplay of the colonial regime{\textquoteright}s political policing and the concurrent nationalist movement in the final years of the Dutch East Indies. While scholars commonly see the late 1920s and 1930s as a period of {\textquotedblleft}peace and order{\textquotedblright} under the relatively stable rule of the Dutch Beambtenstaat{\textemdash}an {\textquotedblleft}apolitical, administrative polity par excellence,{\textquotedblright} Shiraishi demonstrates that the colonial authority achieved such {\textquotedblleft}normalcy{\textquotedblright} by {\textquotedblleft}reducing the problem of nationalism to the question of police{\textquotedblright} (p. 16). Boven Digul, a remote penal colony established to intern recalcitrant communists and radical nationalists, stood out as a jarring antithesis to such {\textquotedblleft}normalcy.{\textquotedblright} The mass internment camp served as both a metaphor and ground for the colonial regime{\textquoteright}s policing and surveillance practices, epitomizing Dutch repressive colonial strategies that aimed to confine Indonesians{\textquoteright} political life within an extremely narrow space.},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1163/22134379-17902010},
	author = {Kankan Xie}
}
