A Surrealist Rethinking of Colonial Indonesia’s Emerging Modernity: Revisiting Rudolf Mrázek’s Engineers of Happy Land
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If people in Southeast Asia today continue (as do their counterparts elsewhere) to live under the impact of Janus-faced, contradictory modernity (both constructive and corrosive); if postmodernism has shown itself as just one of modernity’s many faces; and if several of Southeast Asia’s postcolonial modernities have colonial roots; then it seems rewarding, theoretically and practically, for us to perform, today, a creative re-reading of some of the major works on Southeast Asia’s modernity. One such work is Rudolf Mrázek’s 2002 study on Indonesia’s modernity: Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in the Colony (hereafter EHL). Now that EHL is more than 20 years old, we are in a better position to see and unlock its hidden potential. More than just another scholarly contribution to the progress of Southeast Asian Studies, EHL has begun to reveal itself as a tool for the general reader (in contemporary Southeast Asia and beyond) to interpret and manage his or her own experience of modernity. As a first step toward such an alternative application of EHL, this paper tries to show that it is best understood as a work of “surrealist historiography,” one that may help today’s readers to dispel the myths of modernity, colonial and postcolonial. This political awakening is a crucial element in collective action for social transformation.
Abstract
If people in Southeast Asia today continue (as do their counterparts elsewhere) to live under the impact of Janus-faced, contradictory modernity (both constructive and corrosive); if postmodernism has shown itself as just one of modernity’s many faces; and if several of Southeast Asia’s postcolonial modernities have colonial roots; then it seems rewarding, theoretically and practically, for us to perform, today, a creative re-reading of some of the major works on Southeast Asia’s modernity. One such work is Rudolf Mrázek’s 2002 study on Indonesia’s modernity: Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in the Colony (hereafter EHL). Now that EHL is more than 20 years old, we are in a better position to see and unlock its hidden potential. More than just another scholarly contribution to the progress of Southeast Asian Studies, EHL has begun to reveal itself as a tool for the general reader (in contemporary Southeast Asia and beyond) to interpret and manage his or her own experience of modernity. As a first step toward such an alternative application of EHL, this paper tries to show that it is best understood as a work of “surrealist historiography,” one that may help today’s readers to dispel the myths of modernity, colonial and postcolonial. This political awakening is a crucial element in collective action for social transformation.
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