Amir Sjarifoeeddin: Politics and Revolution in Indonesia
Amir Sjarifoeddin had been considered, until 1947, next to Sukarno, the crucial figure of the Indonesian struggle for emancipation. After he became involved with the radical left of the Indonesian political spectrum and killed in the so-called Madiun Affair 1948 he disappeared from historiography and often from memory. His impact on modern Indonesian history as well as the structure of the forgetting will be studied.
Project Description
Amir Sjarifoeddin’s biography is sorely missing in literature on the history of Indonesia, Southeast Asia and indeed twentieth century modernity, revolution and radicalism. The project aims at studying general problems of political, social and intellectual order of things, uprisings, and leavings traces. In his life Amir passed through and was deeply touched by cultures, and particularly urban cultures of the centers of modernity, European and Asian, like Haarlem and Leiden, Medan and Jakarta. The project will aim at the main inspiration for this endeavor, the until now largely untested feasibility of biographical approach for urban studies.
Selected Publications
1) Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia, Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca 1994
2) Engineers of Happy Land: Nationalism and Technology in Indonesia, Princeton Univerity Press, 2002
3) The Complete Life of Camp People: Colonialism, Fascism and Concentrated Modernity. Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2019