Description:

EDGS Speaker Series

Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia

Dr. Arnout van der Meer, Associate Professor of History, Colby College

Performing Power illuminates how colonial dominance in Indonesia was legitimized, maintained, negotiated, and contested through the everyday staging and public performance of power between the colonizer and colonized. Dr. van der Meer explores what seemingly ordinary interactions reveal about the construction of national, racial, social, religious, and gender identities as well as the experience of modernity in colonial Indonesia

Speaker’s Bio:

Dr. Arnout van der Meer is an Associate Professor of History at Colby College, a liberal arts college in Maine (USA), where he teaches and studies Indonesian, Southeast Asian, and World History. His current research focuses on the proliferation of annual fairs in Southeast Asia, for instance in Jakarta, Manila, and Hanoi, during the late colonial period. Dr. van der Meer received his doctoral degree from Rutgers University and MA from Leiden University. He is also a research fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).

His book, Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2021), explores the ways in which colonialism was legitimized and contested through everyday interactions—language, manners, material status symbols, and even physical gestures and posture—in nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Indonesia.