‘The past should not affect the children’:intergenerational hauntings in the homes of Indo-European families

This article examines how the traumatic experiences of pre- vious Indo-European or Indische generations shape future generations’ intergenerational family dynamics and practices within home environments. By analysing life story interviews with Indo-Europeans from the first, second and third gen- eration within twenty-one families, we illustrate how inter- generational hauntings are embodied, expressed and negotiated among various generations within home envi- ronments. The Indo-European diaspora has multi-generational ‘mixed’ Dutch-Indonesian ancestry and collective memories of the colonial Dutch East Indies, the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War, the Indonesian National Revolution, and families’ subsequent repatriation to the Netherlands. Shaped by their alleged success in hav- ing silently assimilated in the Netherlands, public narratives often neglect Indo-Europeans’ daily realities and histories. We argue that personal and collective histories of war vio- lence, racialized violence and displacement are deeply ingrained in Indo-European intergenerational and gendered family dynamics and practices in home environments. These intergenerational hauntings are imbued in both presence and absence in the various atmospheres and social and physical spaces of home

Beyond Bali : expanding postcolonial visions of intimacy and performance in the contemporary Netherlands

This thesis is an ethnography of Balinese individuals living in the Netherlands and their non-Balinese partners. It examines Balinese peoples’ cultural identification beyond Bali in relation to gender and class and the socio-economic and political circumstances of migration. I argue that Balinese culture is historically changing in a creative interplay with foreign influences, specifically Dutch colonialism, the Indonesian state and tourism. Acknowledging significant differences in how Balinese men and women invest in and relate to Balinese culture, the thesis explores the processes of identification in both the domestic sphere of conjugal intimacies and the public performance of dance, feasts and rituals. It further examines several nodes of transnational interactions between Bali and the Netherlands, exploring how histories of empire have shaped and reshaped contemporary imaginations of Oriental and Occidental places. I focus on how contemporary cross-cultural exchanges create fluid spaces of ambivalence, struggle and negotiations based on the interaction of bodies historically inscribed with particular meanings of gender, race and economy. I suggest that novel categorisations and policies towards non-Western foreigners in the Netherlands are producing a new racism and influence the subjectivity of those so labelled. State polices inflect race, class and gender through powerful discourses that shape personal expectations and subjectivities in everyday life

The Search for Sensuous Geographies of Absence: Indisch Mediation of Loss

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland engage with geographies of loss, and how travel serves as an active process of mediation. My focus is on Indies (Indonesian-Dutch) migrants and their descendants living in the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic material I explore how migrants� descendants associate colonial times and ancestral homelands with narrative strategies of exclusion and containment and tempo doeloe discourses (a nostalgic longing for the �good old days�) as generative of a collective victimhood. I seek to unravel how descendants explore agentic modalities of travel in order to reactivate, re-embody, and thus intervene in their families� and collective histories. The article analyses how affective experiences of places of and far beyond the geographical locations of the Dutch East Indies have a potential to invigorate embodied Indies sensibilities. Thus, I write towards a theory of intergenerational transmission and felt dispositions in relation to old, multiracial diasporas such as the Indies. I argue that searches for sensuous geographies of absence are a specific modality of genealogy work that serves as a vehicle through which to move across and among different times in order to destabilize postcolonial temporalities

Dutch Women and Balinese Men: Intimacies, Popular Discourses and Citizenship rights

The present article looks how intimate liaisons between Dutch women and Balinese men are intertwined in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways in regard to class position, gender ideologies and immigration policy in the contemporary Netherlands. Central to this analysis is a dialogue between Dutch women, their Balinese partners and popular discourse about Dutch women who marry 'the other men'. I examine how citizenship regulations that play a significant role in interfamilial relations of interdependency form complex gender dynamics, and how Dutch women's rhetoric about the emancipation of Dutch women and desire for a companionate marriage tend to collide with the practices of everyday life. I argue that gender ideologies in these cross-cultural liaisons are conceptualised and reconceptualised in relation to 'gender imaginings'. I suggest that the ideals of companionate marriage, favoured by Dutch women, are linked directly to ideals of modernity and individualism, in which particular scripts of gender relations are used to differentiate progressive individuals from those who are not

‘Sukarno’s students’: reconfiguring notions of exile, community and remembering

Following the events of 1965-66, some of the Indonesian students who had been sent overseas to study remained in their countries of study while others moved across the Eastern bloc in search of a country in which to reside permanently. Some, who later on became known as political exiles, settled in the Netherlands, and many continued to participate in networks across the world. This paper focuses on the exiles' historical trajectories and their interactions with recent Balinese migrants in the Netherlands, including the establishment in the mid-1990s of a Balinese migrant society. The recent Balinese migrants often refer to the exiles as 'Sukarno's students'. The analyses of the migratory trajectories of the Balinese political exiles and their interaction with recent migrants, situated both in the present and in former socio-political contexts, point to the shifting meanings of exile, home, community and remembering. This paper argues that the exiles are relational subjects who were active agents in the creation of the Indonesian leftist diaspora. Finally, the paper explores processes integral to the participation of the leftist diaspora in the Indonesian national project