摘要:

More than three decades after the release of his seminal work An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912–1926, 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’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 “peace and order” under the relatively stable rule of the Dutch Beambtenstaat—an “apolitical, administrative polity par excellence,” Shiraishi demonstrates that the colonial authority achieved such “normalcy” by “reducing the problem of nationalism to the question of police” (p. 16). Boven Digul, a remote penal colony established to intern recalcitrant communists and radical nationalists, stood out as a jarring antithesis to such “normalcy.” The mass internment camp served as both a metaphor and ground for the colonial regime’s policing and surveillance practices, epitomizing Dutch repressive colonial strategies that aimed to confine Indonesians’ political life within an extremely narrow space.

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