Seminar | Thoughts of the heart: Feelings at home and the gendering of print culture in Indonesia, 1900s-1910s | Eunike Setiadarma

In this seminar I will introduce my dissertation project, The Craft of Care: Home Life, Ordinary Feelings, and the Intimate Public in Twentieth Century Indonesia. It offers a brief overview of my research that examines the narratives and images of household and family by Indonesian writers and intellectuals to understand how they talked about practices of domestic care, why they talked about it, and what constituted these practices.

These care relations appeared not only in the form of household manuals, fictions, poems, advice columns, reader’s letters, advertisement, and photographs. They also appeared in the form of social experiences of sharing and consuming those materials. I seek to develop the following argument: household scenes and associated networks of print culture served to circulate ordinary feelings. In doing so, they contributed to the emergence of an intimate public sphere in the region during various political regimes. In this sphere, people in the region, mostly urban middle-class, shared their days and dreams and developed a sense of belonging. In this sphere, they cared about care at home and each other’s domestic life. In this sphere, they became an intimate public.

Speaker

Eunike G. Setiadarma (Nik) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Northwestern University, studying intellectual history of twentieth century Indonesia and Southeast Asia. More broadly, Nik is interested in the intersection of political thought and popular culture, including the history of literary and art discourse.

Moderator

David Kloos is a senior researcher at KITLV. He is interested in religion, gender, violence, colonialism, knowledge formation, visual methods, and the social and political aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV (room 1.68) and online via Zoom, on Thursday 6 July, from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET).

Registration

If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: [email protected].

If you wish to join this webinar online, please register here.

Image

‘A silhouette of a woman’, by unknown artist, Madjalah Kutilang (1963-1965).