A seasoned and respected observer of Indonesia's contemporary cultural scene, Ariel Heryanto has written extensively on Indonesia's middle classes, ethnopolitics, and media. In this new book, he brings this far-ranging experience to bear on Indonesian popular culture, particularly but not only in relation to contemporary Indonesian screen culture (film and television, as well as electronic media). A key theme of Identity and Pleasure is that the collapse of Suharto's authoritarian New Order (1966–98) left a cultural and power vacuum that has resulted in an ongoing and highly unstable contestation over politics and identity. That contestation, Heryanto writes, is focused most consistently on new cultural forms aimed at urban middle-class youth; popular culture has become a critical site for “ideological battles to achieve a hegemonic position in the nation's power vacuum” (p. 12).
Consistent with the wide-ranging analysis for which he has long been renowned, Heryanto includes in his analysis not only popular culture as conventionally understood but important aspects of Indonesian political culture as well; among them, he places particular emphasis on what he describes as Indonesia's “serious historical amnesia” (p. 7) with regard to the events of 1965–66 and the mass killing of purported Indonesian communists. With a similarly expansive perspective, he also gives thematic centrality to the centuries-long discrimination against Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority and lower classes. In all of these excursions and critiques, Heryanto is careful to underscore that many of the cultural phenomena that have come to the fore in the post-Suharto period were put in place prior to the end of the New Order. This is especially true with regard to the Islamic resurgence and its varied cultural and political expressions. The fact that in the last decade of his rule Suharto attempted to court Indonesian Muslims by instituting a number of more “Islam-friendly” measures, Heryanto points out, has often been overlooked in both scholarly and popular works.
Heryanto frames his work with regard to the politics and culture of Islam within the well-known theoretical model of “post-Islamism,” an approach first developed by Asef Bayat to describe the religious and political situation of countries in the Muslim Middle East such as Iran and Turkey.Footnote 11 Heryanto defines Islamism as “any social movement that advocates and pursues the maximized applications of Islamic teachings (as understood by its proponents) in the widest possible scope of public life, including but not restricted to the formal adoption and enforcement of sharia law as the basis of government in a given nation-state” (p. 39). In positioning itself at counter-currents to Islamism, post-Islamism, Heryanto observes, is neither anti-Islamic nor secularist. Rather it is an attempt to fuse religiosity with rights, faith, and freedom, and to marry Islam with individual choice, democracy, and modernity (p. 38). A number of commentators on Bayat's work have observed that the post-Islamism frame is not an easy fit for Indonesia, where Islam has always taken the form of multiple and varied religious streams and only a small percentage of Indonesians have ever been in favor of transforming Indonesia into an Islamic state or implementing sharia law as its foundation. Nor is there evidence of a groundswell of resistance to Islamization in Indonesia like that observed in Iran, Egypt, or Turkey. Heryanto distinguishes, however, between political post-Islamism and cultural post-Islamism. It is cultural post-Islamism that is growing rapidly in Indonesia, he argues, and is particularly evident in contemporary expressions of Indonesian popular culture.
The diversity and competition among Islamist and post-Islamist views in the domain of cinema is the focus of chapter 3, “Cinematic Battle.” In it Heryanto reexamines the reasons for the popularity of several key Indonesian films that appeared in the first decade of the new millennium, situating them within the context of the Islamic resurgence and related political developments. The most spectacular of these cinematic successes was the film Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love, 2008), which drew some 3.7 million viewers into Indonesian theatres (p. 51). A striking feature of Ayat-Ayat Cinta and of other films Heryanto takes up from this period is that their main characters are educated youth who are often students of Islam; a second trademark is that their male protagonists are represented as “upstanding and flawless.” Notwithstanding their ostensibly Islamic subject matter, these films are also love stories that feature didactic dialogues on Islamic ethics as it pertains to romance, gender interaction, and other aspects of daily life (p. 64). These films, Heryanto argues, demonstrate that a new generation of Indonesian Muslim youth find religious piety and modernity equally appealing and not intrinsically contradictory. In these films, moreover, he finds evidence of an important new post-Islamic “hybridity,” that is, a blending of elements of Islamic textuality as well as narrative stylistics borrowed from Hollywood and Bollywood.
Heryanto discovers a similar hybridity in the “K-pop” phenomenon (chapter 7, “K-Pop and Gendered Asianizations”). He uses “K-pop” as a cover term to refer to the broader phenomenon of Indonesian interest in popular cultural forms from Taiwan, Japan, and China, as well as South Korea. He cites a fascinating statistic: that in one year, 2010, there were over 120 fan-organized K-pop-related events held across Indonesia. These included fan gatherings, K-pop festivals, concerts, and dance covers with fans dressing up in costume and imitating the dance routines of their idols (p. 167). Tellingly, the key participants in K-pop fandom are young Muslim women. While married women are more often involved in privately viewing soap operas and music videos as individuals, younger women are the overwhelming participants in public and collective performances. Most of these young women are in their teens and twenties, and many wear Muslim headscarves. When asked if they feel any conflict between their involvement in such activities and being pious Muslims, they overwhelmingly respond, “no.” They instead emphasize their appreciation of the music and the easy-going warmth and striking good looks of the band members. Heryanto finds in this encouraging evidence of new female agency on the one hand but also of a more positive evaluation of Indonesia's ethnic Chinese minority.
Popular Asian soap operas take up similar themes of empowerment and personal success, particularly with regard to female characters. Stories take place against the backdrop of wealth and stylized consumption, while their core narratives focus on romance. Nonetheless, themes of self-restraint, hard work, and discipline contrast with common themes of Hollywood and even mainline Indonesian productions. No less significant, heroines are often as tough and admirable as their male love interests; there is also little if any expression of physical intimacy. In these narratives as well, Heryanto finds encouraging signs of gender equity and a new interest in less authoritarian forms of masculinity.
Identity and Pleasure is ambitious and wide-ranging. In analyzing multiple and varied contemporary Indonesian pop cultural forms against the backdrop of recent political and religious developments, this book constitutes an important resource, not just for specialists of Asian popular cultures, but for scholars of Indonesia and of Southeast Asia in general. It also offers intriguing and important comparisons with Muslim Middle Eastern countries, which are engaged in their own struggles over the proper place of popular culture and media in an age of political and religious contestation.
