KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
In this seminar, Luttikhuis explicates this argument by tracing the professional careers and social lives of a particular group of predominantly (but not exclusively) ‘Indo-Europeans’. His case study here is a community of lower-level white-collar workers in a conglomerate of private railway companies active on North-Java. Luttikhuis demonstrates that in this group, questions of race and miscegenation were not always central to issues of identity and hierarchy. What mattered more to the members of this group was that their colleagues lived up to similar ideals of modernity and professionalism. In fact, then, cultural and class affiliation were often equally important as race.
Bart Luttikhuis received his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in 2014 for his dissertation entitled Negotiating modernity: Europeanness in late colonial Indonesia, 1910-1942. Currently, Luttikhuis is a researcher at KITLV working on the project ‘Dutch military operations in Indonesia, 1945-1950’.
If you wish to attend please register with Yayah Siegers: [email protected]