In the contemporary scholarship of colonialism, culture serves as an important lens to understand the complex power dynamics between the coloniser and the colonised. On the one hand, scholars have documented the profound invasiveness of colonial cultural projects that violently dispossess indigenous cultures, and on the other hand, they have discussed resilient, quotidian, and hybrid cultural spaces of the colonised. The idea of cultural hybridity is especially significant for proponents of the bottom-up position because of the opportunities it opens up for challenging the dominant colonial cultural discourse and for rewriting colonial history.
Yet, there is also an important third position focusing on the colonial appropriation of indigeneity for political legitimacy. Colonial appropriation of indigeneity has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century when colonisers shifted their cultural policies to manage native cultures for the explicit political goal of solidifying their authority. This insight is articulated by Nicholas Dirks in his influential work on the colonial role in constructing the caste system in India. According to Dirks, colonialism was a ‘cultural project of control’ as colonial knowledge of the native ‘enabled conquest and was produced by it’ (Nicholas Dirks, Castes of mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India, 2011, p. 9). The articulation of indigeneity within colonial structures reflects a purposeful dynamic of power intended to maintain colonial dominance.
Cross-cultural exchange and the colonial imaginary is an interesting collection of historical accounts of Southeast Asia, which revisits the contested colonial discourse of cultural borders and identity. The editor, Hazel Hahn, challenges the ‘standard narrative of colonial culture’ that assumes colonial cultural dominance (p. 1). With ‘multi-linear trajectories of the flow of objects, cultural practices, and cultural knowledge, through a trans-imperial framework’ (p. 2), the colonised is no longer viewed as a passive recipient of colonial culture. The concept of cultural hybridity, especially the malleability of cultural borders, is central to understanding the editor's vision of ‘trans-cultural exchange’.
Hahn's chapter, for example, revisits colonial spatiality by examining the ‘politics of cultural heritage’ based on local, colonial and postcolonial accounts of Hindu Tamil temples in Saigon. Her chapter illuminates the rich, yet underdocumented, history of South Asian migration to Cochinchina, especially the trait of cultural hybridity in Saigon's Tamil temples rooted in the everyday interactions with French colonisers as well as with local Vietnamese. The chapter by Caroline Herbelin follows Hahn's perspective of inter-culturalism by providing a spatial analysis of cultural borrowing based on the palace of the governor-general in Hanoi and French homes built by wealthy Vietnamese in rural Cochinchina. The edited volume includes original accounts of border-crossing, including George Dutton's documentation of a Vietnamese Catholic priest's observation of everyday life in nineteenth-century Lisbon; Susie Protschky's gender-based analysis examining racially transgressive dress in colonial Java and Europe, in which an Indo-European woman's body acts as a site of cross-cultural encounter; and Frederick Schenker's work on the colonial labour mobility of Filipino jazz musicians in colonial Asia and their construction of new vernacular meanings attached to jazz.
While Hahn's vision centres on hybrid and shared patterns of horizontal exchange, what the editor could have engaged with more effectively was the third position on colonial cultural interactions, namely the colonial appropriation of indigeneity. This colonial appropriation is evident in top-down and penetrating processes that collect, reinterpret, and embody ‘authentic indigeneity’ in order to legitimise colonial rule. These insights are especially developed by three contributors to the book: Arnout van der Meer, Sarah Moser, and Matthew Shauer.
The three authors explore colonial engagement with indigeneity in terms of: first, the colonial performance of indigeneity (van der Meer); second, the colonial discourse of indigeneity (Shauer); and third, the long-lasting legacies of the colonial appropriation of indigeneity (Moser). The colonial selective consumption of indigeneity is also present, although not as explicit, particularly in Benita Stambler's chapter on the production of photographs of ‘natives’ in British Ceylon.
Arnout van der Meer provides an especially compelling analysis of the colonial performance of indigeneity and its discontents based on his archival work on the Dutch East Indies. His chapter examines early twentieth century public debates surrounding Dutch colonial officers’ practice of Javanese rituals of deference, collectively known as hormat (respect), for the purpose of establishing colonial authority. According to Van der Meer, ‘by adopting Javanese rituals and symbols of power, the Dutch tried to adopt the corresponding concept of power that made them relevant’ (p. 78, emphasis added). This colonial manipulation of indigeneity was challenged by young Dutch-educated Javanese officials, as well as a small group of progressive elite Dutch officials. The progressive camp of the coloniser rejected hormat as ineffective and sought a modern version of deference that would be congruent with imperial rule. Despite their divergent views on cultural governance, both conservative and progressive colonial positions mirrored their moral anxieties over a potential loss of legitimacy, as well as the centrality of culture as a technology of power.
While Van der Meer shows both the invasive and fragmented nature of the colonial performance of indigeneity, Shauer explores the colonial discourse of indigeneity, especially the role of colonial amateur scholars and their knowledge accumulation of ‘authentic Malay heritage’ in British Malaya. He argues that ‘the British hoped to utilize this knowledge not to only train civil servants but to aid governance through the appropriation, reinterpretation, and reinforcement of selected Malay cultural traditions’ (p. 52). Colonial promotion of ‘authentic Malay traditions’, although presented as an act of colonial benevolence, was necessary for establishing colonial moral superiority.
Sarah Moser's chapter on Malaysian urbanism engages with colonial expressions of indigeneity, but her focus is on the postcolonial inheritance of ‘authentic indigeneity’ stemming from colonialism. Moser examines the persistence of colonial values, including an exoticised Malay-Muslim identity and a strategy of racial segregation, in contemporary city planning in the recently built capital, Putrajaya. Despite their avowed desire to be disconnected from the colonial past, urban planners tied to the ruling party reinstated British cultural toolkits in establishing their moral and political legitimacy. While Shauer's chapter discusses the colonial discursive construction of the ‘authentic Malay’, Moser dissects the long-lasting legacies of such colonial discourse.
What is evident here is the centrality of power in colonial cultural exchange. The colonial promotion of indigeneity was not the end of, but a sophisticated mode of, control. By focusing on culture as dynamic, evolving, and malleable processes, the editor has assembled an interesting volume, but the profound invasiveness and perniciousness of colonial ‘trans-cultural exchange’ could have been discussed more effectively. The colonial appropriation of ‘the native’—in the form of performance, discourse, and consumption—should not be reduced purely to the indigenous influence on the West. As Van der Meer rightfully argues, ‘hybrid cultures were thus not merely accidental side effects of colonialism in Southeast Asia, but essential to its functioning’ (p. 77).
