The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Indonesian court dance, a purportedly pure and untouched tradition, is famed throughout the world for its sublime calm and stillness. Yet this unyieldingly peaceful surface conceals a time of political repression and mass killing. Between 1965 and 1966, some one million Indonesiansincluding a large percentage of the countrys musicians, artists, and dancerswere killed, arrested, or disappeared as Suharto established a virtual dictatorship that ruled for the next thirty years.

In The Dance That Makes You Vanish, an examination of the relationship between female dancers and the Indonesian state since 1965, Rachmi Diyah Larasati elucidates the Suharto regimes dual-edged strategy: persecuting and killing performers perceived as communist or left leaning while simultaneously producing and deploying replicasnew bodies trained to standardize and unify the unruly movements and voices of those vanishedas idealized representatives of Indonesias cultural elegance and composure in bowing to autocratic rule. Analyzing this history, Larasati shows how the Suharto regimes obsessive attempts to control and harness Indonesian dance for its own political ends have functioned as both smoke screen and smoke signal, inadvertently drawing attention to the site of state violence and criminality by constantly pointing out the perfection of the mask that covers it.

Reflecting on her own experiences as an Indonesian national troupe dancer from a family of persecuted female dancers and activists, Larasati brings to life a powerful, multifaceted investigation of the pervasive use of culture as a vehicle for state repression and the global mass-marketing of national identity.

Reviews

"Womens bodies, dancing bodies: in this haunting book, they lead us to political terror and its erasure in safely contained cultural performance. The ghosts of dancers killed in state-sponsored anti-communist frenzy shimmer before us, their movements precisely replicated by their state-cleansed replacements. Memoir here winds in and out of cultural critique; we are led up to that vanishing point where power and violence tear their way into the heart."Anna Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

Author Bio

Rachmi Diyah Larasati is assistant professor of cultural theory, critical studies, and dance history in the department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. She also holds an affiliate graduate faculty position there in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and is a former guest faculty at the Brown University Critical Global Humanities Research Institute.