Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Michelle Miller, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. 

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I look at the personal experiences and public representations of those in Indonesia who came to be known as “communist children” (or, more sympathetically, as “children of victims”): the children and grandchildren of individuals imprisoned or killed during a violent anticommunist purge in 1965-66. In doing so, I aim to contribute to scholarly work on collective memory and the intergenerational transmission of experiences of political violence, emphasizing the way in which public perceptions and personal experiences of this process of transmission intertwine to shape how social actors remember, reinterpret, or seek justice for the violence of the past.

Throughout the New Order era in Indonesia (1966-1998)–which had anticommunism as one of its ideological bases–the systematic state and societal discrimination directed against these “communist children” was justified by the assumption that kinship and familial proximity made them just as ideologically suspect as their parents.

Since the violent events of 1965-66, the fate and treatment of these children has been presented by Indonesians of various ideological persuasions as being enormously consequential for the whole of Indonesian society, representing both a test of the humaneness of the Indonesian state and society, and a potential source of dangerous “vengeance” (dendam) with violent results. Drawing upon seventeen months of fieldwork research in Central Java, I examine the various ways in which these individuals have responded to these public discourses, and the ways in which they have claimed moral and representational authority based upon varying degrees of “knowing” and “not knowing” the past.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Andrew Conroe is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore. He received his PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan in 2012, and prior to that an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan. His dissertation, entitled Generating History: Violence and the Risks of Remembering for Families of Former Political Prisoners in Post-New Order Indonesia, examines the intergenerational transmission of memories of political violence in modern Indonesia. His current research project involves a broader examination of the ways in which contested memories move between (and indeed, help to delineate) private and public realms in postcolonial Indonesia, and the role that media plays in this process.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg