Coexist with colonist; Construction of identity and images of the communion in post-colonial Indonesia.
Subject area, aims and objectives
Subject Area
Britain, Dutch and Japan are the three empires which politically colonised Indonesia for more than 100 years. After gaining their independence in 1945, Indonesia began constructing their identity to state their power and gain recognition from other countries. However, during the transition period, there are possibilities that the formation of identity may produce by doing assimilation with former colonist country by adjusting and adapting the existing colonist identity legacy. The relationship during colonial period between the individual and socio-cultural space is as follows shaped in a dual hybrid position, a hybrid that represents the identity of Indonesian communion.
This research would like to examine the visual representation of Indonesian communion. The visual identity used by the state such as the national emblem, currency design, military crest, and maps–which the latest considered as Western imperial’s science and technology gifts– is a construction of the national identity through the symbolism which represents Indonesia’s in international circumstance.
Aims
- Examining the identity formation and transition in pre and post-colonial Indonesia (a decade between 1940– 1950), which may generate some insight about how the hybrid of two visual identities–Indonesia’s and Colonist–coexist and later build the images of the communion in Indonesian minds.
- Utilizing graphic design studies to excavate the complexity of identity construction during the postcolonial period which cannot be understood by conventional history narrative.
Objectives
- Examine and exploring the founded sources idea, and learn the method of combining the visual identification such as in symbols, colour or visual style which considered share universal visual language and mutual value for both sides.
- Deconstruct how the product such as technology and science perceived and accepted by the natives and later adapted it as their identity. (Such as Map)
- Experimenting and do iterative process with deconstruction method.
- Examine the tools used by the government to certifies the identity and nationality during decades of transition. (contemporary: Passport)
- Identify how national identity intertwined and influence with personal details (such as ID Card, Passport) which developed the image as a part of the community.
Historical context
Postcolonial History
The research begins with the studies and history of postcolonialism, which commonly understand as an aftermath of Western colonialism or various form of imperialism, both represented in the historical period or state of affair. However, some argue that, etymologically, postcolonialism frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept; the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state. Gilbert and Tompkins (1996) suggested that a theory of post-colonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism. The postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their voices, and thus produce cultural discourses of philosophy, language, society and economy, balancing the imbalanced us-and-them binary power-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.
The Postcolonialism studies indicate a possible future of overcoming colonialism, anticipating the potential new forms of the global empire and new forms of domination and subordination (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2018).
Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonialism aimed at destabilising these theories (intellectual and linguistic, social and economic) employing which colonialists “perceive”, “understand”, and “know” the world. The postcolonial theory thus establishes intellectual spaces for subaltern peoples to speak for themselves, in their voices, and thus produce cultural discourses of philosophy, language, society and economy, balancing the imbalanced us-and-them binary power-relationship between the colonist and the colonial subjects.
Postcolonial Identity
Decolonized people develop a postcolonial identity that based on interactions between different identities (cultural, national, and ethnic as well as gender and class-based) which are committed varying degrees of social power by the colonial society. In postcolonial literature, the anti-conquest narrative analyses the identity politics that are the social and cultural perspectives of the subaltern colonial subjects—their creative resistance to the culture of the coloniser. How such cultural resistance complicated the establishment of a colonial society; how the colonisers developed their postcolonial identity; and how neocolonialism actively employs the Us-and-Them binary social relation to view the non-Western world as inhabited by The Other.
However, postcolonial theory is somehow problematic. John Lye (1997) argues that while the theory deals with the reading and writing of literature written in previously or currently colonised countries, or literature written in colonising countries which deals with colonisation or colonised peoples. The post-colonial theory focuses particularly on;
- The way in which literature by the colonising culture distorts the experience and realities, and inscribes the inferiority, of the colonised people
- literature by colonised peoples which attempts to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past’s certain otherness.
It can also deal with the way in which literature in colonising countries appropriates the language, images, scenes, traditions and so forth of colonised countries.
Marxist Scholar Vivek Chibber (2013) express that postcolonial theory will remember for its revival of cultural essentialism and its acting as an endorsement of orientalism, rather than being an antidote to it. It is essentialized cultures, painting them as fixed and static categories and presents the difference between East and West as unbridgeable. On his book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Chibber focusing mainly on the strain of postcolonial theory known as subaltern studies. He makes a strong case for why we can — and must — conceptualise the non-Western world through the same analytical lens that we use to understand developments in the West.
Contemporary Context
Nina Katchadourian
Hand-held Subway, Geographic Pathologies, Finland’s Longest Road, Finland’s Unnamed Islands, Head of Spain. 1996-2008.
Various work from Nina Katchadourian which exploring the cartographic works. She deconstruct an existing maps and atlas of New York subway system, Finland’s highway, Spanish paper road map to create a new possibility of creating meaning and generates a new ways of seeing things.
Meta Haven Sealand Identity Project
Meta Haven collaborate on the Sealand Identity Project, which was to conceive a national identity for the Principality of Sealand, which is a self-proclaimed nation on a former war platform near the coast of the UK.
Sealand Identity Project was really a combination of this idea of sovereignty, self-proclaimed nationhood, in combination with this flawed entrepreneurial dream of starting an offshore business onboard Sealand.
Theoretical Context
Critical Theory
History of Politics and Identity
Jonathan Friedman (1994) points out there were two aspects of the relation between social identification and the making of history. The first concerned the relationship between the social conditions of identity formation and the production of culturally viable past. The second introduced so-called scientific constructions of other people’s past into the same frame argument.
On the Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, Friedman (1992, p.41) acknowledges that history and discourse about the making of history are positional, that is, it is dependent upon where one located in social reality, within society, and within the global process. The idea is even applicable to the present discourse, which in no way represents an attempt to stand in some objective truth-sphere above or outside of the goings-on of the world. Objective history, just as any other history, is produced in a definitive context and is a particular kind of project.
Besides, he suggested that the discourse of history as well as of myth is simultaneously a discourse of identity; it consists of attributing a meaningful past to a structural present. Objective history produced in the context of a particular kind of selfhood, one that based on a radical separation of the subject from any particular identity, and which objectifies and textualises reality.
Imagined Community
A country which merely liberated from their former colonist would be struggling in defining their own political identity and build their image of communion. As they build the identity on the top of the ruins of existing colonist structure, it would be unavoidable to eradicate their former identity. Even the previous one is arguably an already hybrid of different cultures. However, it was understood that images of the communion were built not only taking the references from the community itself, but also construct by external influence. Benedict Anderson’s theory regarding the identity of a community would be very fit to depict the condition of emerging, newly independent nation.
Anderson (1983, p.6) defines the nation as, “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign…It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. Anderson sees the nation as a social construct, an “imagined community” in which members feel a commonality with others, feel a “horizontal” comradeship with each other even though they may not know them. It could be said that the lasting appeal and political resilience of nationalism of newly independence nation affirm the strength of patriotic feeling and the enormous sacrifices people have made on behalf of their nation.
In the chapter “The Origins of National Consciousness”, where he argues that the convergence of capitalism, printing, and the diversity of vernacular languages led to the birth of national consciousness. Popular nationalism threatened to exclude the European monarchies from the new imagined communities, as the dynasties had dubious and often conflicting national credentials. They responded with what Anderson terms “official nationalism,” a Machiavellian appropriation of nationalist ideas to secure dynastic legitimacy and suppress ethnolinguistic subject groups within their realms. In the European colonial empires, official nationalism served as a tool of the imperial administration.
Census, Map, Museum.
In the more specific topic, Anderson introduces three institutions of powers– Census, Map, Museum–that profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion and the legitimacy of its ancestry. As the research emphasises on more pragmatic visual based identity, the writer considered it would be more fruitful on profoundly examining the Map topic. However, the assumption made after thoughtfully deal with the capacity of the author, which couldn’t afford further research on Census and Museum.
It could be said that the Mercatorian map, which brought in by the European colonisers via print, was beginning to shape the imagination of Southeast Asians, including Indonesia (Anderson, 1983, p. 247) Regarding most communication theories anti-common sense, a map is a scientific abstraction of reality. A map merely represents something which already exists objectively “there”. Anderson (1983) points out, “In the history, I have described, this relationship was reversed. A map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. In other words, a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent… It had become a real instrument to concretise projections on the earth’s surface… The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served”
Map as a Logo
As an administrative and military tool, maps acknowledge the ability as the second avatar of one nation or empire, the map-as-logo. Its origins were reasonably innocent— the practice of the imperial states of colouring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye. British colonies were usually pink-red. French purple-blue, Dutch yellow-brown, and so on. (Anderson, 1983, p. 250) The map becomes a pure sign, no longer compass to the world. As the map then entered an infinite reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine which made them instantly recognisable and visible–the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalism.
One of the most known examples of this process is what happened on the island of New Guinea. Dutch Empire settlement in Indonesia was made on the island of New Guinea and succeed to incorporate it into Netherland Indies in 1901 and made it in time for Dutch logoization. Dutch colonial logo-maps sped across in the colony, showing a West New Guinea with nothing to its East, unconsciously reinforced the developing imagined ties among Indonesian nationalist. Even Indonesian nationalist was struggling and made as a national sacred site in the national imagining, they never actually saw New Guinea with their own eyes until the 1960s.
Anderson (1983, p. 251) then relates that “the prestige of the colonial state was accordingly, now intimately, linked to that of its homeland superior.” As more and, more Europeans were being born in Southeast Asia, and being tempted to make it their home. The old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their ancient prestige (which, if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers.
The “warp” of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with unlimited flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there.
Parallel Theory
Cartography
To provide a profound understanding of Map and its influence on the construction of national identity, the writers realised that the study of cartography is one of the best ways to explain it. While map in the previous point bears the capacity to become a witness of powers, the map also can produce their language. Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s theory of general semantics states that; human knowledge is limited by our physical being as well as the structure of language. Though the human experience of reality is limited, yet increasingly see the world through more maps, bigger maps of more data, and more maps of bigger data.
Huffman and Matthews (2014) endorse that, “Cartographers have always been storytellers. This metaphor works well for thematic maps, but topographic or reference maps also tell stories: of the landscape, of the settlement, and of the shape of the natural and human-modified world that surrounds us… Cartographers take data and wrestle it before applying some graphical treatment that provides the narrative. They codify the story in a visual language that they hope speaks to people.”
While cartography has the ability to promoted scientific objectivity over artistic representation and vice versa, the scientific objectivity did not always go the actual representation, a metaphor involved in this work, such map does not always mean the territory. Like any other tools that generate knowledge, maps are informative, but they also can be deceptive, even threatening. At one time or another, it probably safe to say that all of us have been misled by a map designed to hide something the mapmaker did not want us to know, or drawn in such a way that we jump to false conclusions from it.
H. J. de Blij (1996, p. xi-xii) points out that Map crosses the line between information and advocacy. In which later he added that in the world of changing political and strategic relationships and devolving nation-sites, maps become propaganda tools. Some national government even go so far as to commit cartographic aggression, mapping parts of neighbouring countries as their own. Turkish Cypriots, Sri Lankan Tamils, Crimean Russians publish maps that proclaim their political aspirations, fuelling nationalism that spell disaster for the state system.
When the research go further in finding the capability and possibility of a map in manipulating or altering the fact, the research leads to an exciting book written by Dr Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps. In this book, Monmonier (1996, p.2) acknowledges that in showing how to lie with maps, he want to make readers aware that maps–like speeches and paintings–are authored collections of information and also are subject to distortions arising from ignorance, greed, ideological blindness, or malice. The idea seems uncomfortable and uneasy to accepted as it lot of sense of offensiveness. However, he provides a stunning yet straightforward analogy. He offers the idea of the relationship of Map and Scale and its capability on defining the truth.
He took the example as follows; the square inch on the large-scale map could show inch on the ground in far greater detail than the square inch on the small-scale map. Both maps would have to suppress some details, but the designer of the 1:10,000,000-scale map must be far more selective than the cartographer producing the 1:10,000-scale map. In the sense that all maps tell white lies about the planet, the small-scale map has a smaller capacity for truth than large-scale maps.
That is the softball of how maps tell lies, then what about the other possible one? Such as Maps for political propaganda. A good propagandist knows how to shape opinion by manipulating maps. Political persuasion often concerns territorial claims, nationalities, national pride, borders, strategic position, conquests, attacks, troop movements, defences, spheres of influence, regional inequality, and other geographic phenomena conveniently portrayed cartographically. (Monmonier, 1996, p. 87).
People trust maps, and intriguing maps attract the eye as well as connote authority. The map is a perfect symbol of the state and an intellectual weapon–in disputes over territory. Naïve citizens willingly accept as a truth map based on a biased and sometimes crooked selection of facts.
Maps as Symbols of Power and Nationhood
The string of newly independent states formed after World War II, such as Indonesia, revived the national atlas as a symbol of nationhood. In the service of the state, maps and atlases play dual roles. Monmonier (1996, p.89) research confirmed that although a few countries in western Europe and North America had state-sponsored national atlases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these served mainly as reference works and symbols of scientific achievement. However, between 1940 and 1980 the number of national atlases increased from fewer than twenty to more than eighty, as former colonies turned to cartography as a tool of both economic development and political identity.
Even tiny maps on postages stamps can broadcast political propaganda. Postage stamps bearing maps are useful propaganda tools for developing nations and ambitious revolutionary movements. In mail interest, it is useful to keep aspirations alive domestically and to suggest national unity and determination internationally. Postage stamps maps afford a small but numerous means for asserting territorial claims (Monmonier, 1996, p. 91). The war claims between India, Pakistan and China offer us an excellent example of this. Official government tourist maps show Kashmir as a part of India, on the other hand as a part of Pakistan. In reality, India controls the southern part of the state of Kashmir, Pakistan controls the northwestern part, and China controls three sections along the eastern margin. The other example is the Ligitan and Sipadan dispute. It was a territorial dispute between Indonesia and Malaysia over two islands in the Celebes Sea, namely Ligitan and Sipadan. The dispute began in 1969 as Malaysia put them on their official passport and tourism map. Thus it was mostly resolved by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2002, which opined that both of the islands belonged to Malaysia as British Empire, their former colonist, has already settled administrative work since 1930 on both islands.
The latest example given probably slightly capture how the state intervenes-wars, colonialism and national planning intertwined on mapping activities. However, these activities of the major powers not confined to their colonial territories, the very existence of which had left them with global rather than local strategic preoccupations. On Maps and Air Photographs, Dickinson (1979, p. 48) states that; stimulated by various motives, among which the discovery of potentially exploitable areas and resources and the complete delineation of boundaries against possible counter-claimants are two obvious ones, most European nations with colonial possessions carried out various surveys in them often very actively. At first, both the maps themselves and the bodies that produced them were slightly varied.
Methodology
The initial stage of the research would emphasize on experimental design, as this approach is a careful balancing of several features including “power”, generalizability, various forms of “validity”, practicality and cost. A thoughtful balancing of these features in advance will result in an experiment with the best chance of providing useful evidence to modify the current state of knowledge in a particular design field. The goal is to actively design an experiment that has the best chance to produce meaningful, defensible evidence, rather than hoping that proper statistical analysis may be able to correct for defects after the fact.
In the realm of experimenting, the deconstructive method would be the fittest one to tackle the question and inquiry of this research. It is a strategy of critical form-making which performed across a range of artefacts and practices, both historical and contemporary. Deconstruction was born to uncover the meaning of a literary work by studying the way its form and content communicate essential humanistic messages.
Lupton and Miller (1994) argue that deconstruction offer the mode of questioning through and about the technologies, formal devices, social institutions, and founding metaphors of representation. That deconstruction belongs to both history and theory. In Derrida’s theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. How does the external image of things get inside their inner essence? How does the surface get under the skin?
While examining the construction of the identity of the communion, it is important to trace its source, find the authenticity and telling of a story viewed as a passive record of events. The research foresees to gain a vast amount of result and new insight by studying the meaning of a sign and its relationship to other signs in a system. This principle is the basis of structuralism, an approach to language which focuses on the patterns or structures that generate meaning rather than on the “content” of a given code or custom (Lupton, E. and Miller, J. A., 1994)
How does the theory relate to the practical experimentation?
By experimenting with deconstruction would benefit the research in doing widespread disruption, founded on a challenged and remodelled idea of what existing idea/design can do and bring.
What is the theory for?
As a platform on the iterative process. The fundamental principle of deconstruction and how deconstructive method work help to maintain the system while doing experiment and records thought for future transmissions.
What process of experimentation will be used?
Experimenting by deconstructing existing visual material and try a different approach to generate the possible outcome and utilise the basis of structuralism, an approach to language which focuses on the patterns or structures that generate meaning rather than on the “content” of a given code or custom.
How the project recorded and keep track of what have been done.
Documentation by photograph, video, scanned artefact and scheduled digital/printed publication.
Visual evidence
- 1st Iteration on deconstruction method: Deconstruction of Indonesia’s National Emblem.
- 2nd Iteration on deconstruction method: The study of Colonized and Colonist Map.
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