10 May Open acces: ‘Cultural citizenship and modernity in the Netherlands Indies’

By Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘Cultural citizenship and modernity in the Netherlands Indies’ in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History.

By exclusively focusing on the agency of the Dutch, colonial historiography ignored the pivotal role of indigenous middle classes in sustaining the colonial regime. Conventional nationalist historiography, on the other hand, presumes a linear development from urbanization, the rise of the indigenous middle classes, education, and the spread of modernity toward nationalism and revolution as the logical outcome of this process. This article aims to disconnect modernity from nationalism by focusing on the role of cultural citizens in the late-colonial period in the Netherlands Indies, for whom modernity was in the very first place a desirable lifestyle. The extent to which their desires, capitalist strategies, and the interests of the colonial state coincided is illustrated by a variety of advertisements and school posters, which invited members of the indigenous urban middle classes to become cultural citizens of the colony. The image of the cultural citizen was framed within the confinement of the nuclear family, which had a conservative impact on gender relationships.

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