Abidin Kusno is one among the very few scholars who apply the spatial discourses of the humanities to a study of contemporary Indonesia, and this, his second book in English, is heavily indebted to Michel Foucault's discussion of governmentality and new research on memory and social suffering. It is applied, however, to the anxieties of the Indonesia nation-state post-reformasi as the authoritarian control of the Suharto era unravels in the face of an incipient democracy from below. He shares this approach to spatial phenomena with three other scholars: historian Rudolf Mràzek (Engineers of Happy Land, 2002) and anthropologists Freek Colombijn and Martine Barwegen (Under Construction, 2011). Their works tread a common territory of housing schemes, infrastructure projects, and public spaces and monuments. Kusno's first book, Behind the Postcolonial: Architecture, Urban Space and Political Cultures in Indonesia (2000) was a daring exposé of Suharto's New Order era based on detailed empirical research, presented chronologically. This second book demonstrates deep theoretical reflection on a number of different issues around the theme of memory as they are inscribed in material and spatial phenomena. Kusno's politics have grown even bolder over the past decade, and he exposes social challenges that Asian nations deliberately suppress and architectural/urban studies rarely acknowledge. It is consequently a difficult book to navigate. The theoretical analyses of political positions, rather than chronology or case studies, structures the content. From these positions emerge the major themes that organize the book: governmentality, remembering and forgetting, and reminiscences.

Scholars of Indonesia inherit, via Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983; Language and Power, 1990; the Spectre of Comparisons, 1998), a legacy of scholarship that has launched Indonesian studies onto the world stage, but along with it a compulsion to continuously pick apart the politics of the nationalist project. The conditions are certainly quite exceptional: the retention of Jakarta as the Indonesian capital has placed undue duress on successive governments who devise strategies for maintaining its prominence despite its colonial history, vulnerable Chinese community, and lack of a legitimizing mythico-cultural indigenous or Islamic past. Indonesia's political polemics are increasingly played out at a quotidian level by diverse and incidental claimants who, emboldened by reformasi, assert their right to the city. This was also true, we find, of the colonial period, in which urban mobility provoked a modern political consciousness in the quotidian spaces of Java's Indigenous cities.

Kusno argues that, in response to what he terms this “looseness at the centre,” strategies for control are spatial, physical, and material—they depend on visual technologies and spectacular effects that eternally mediate between the citizen and the nation. The mandate to maintain this difficult relationship falls to government/city officials whose tactics range from surveillance mechanisms that are punitive and exclusionary to infrastructure developments that cultivate popular support. For example, the superblock and the flyover emerge as unexpected symbols of a polemical social politics. Kusno also argues that the mnemonic traces of ethnic riots, rape, and imprisonment shape these urban histories, suggesting that like many of her regional neighbors, Indonesia forges its democratic subjectivities through ugly socio-political realities that are contested, often in liberating ways, by a politics from below.