Book Review

Asia

In Rudolf Mrázek's book, Dutch colonizers in the early twentieth century transport the new technologies and fashions of Europe to their huge Southeast Asian colony, the Dutch East Indies. As a result, their Indonesian subjects also enter modernity. They ride in trains and cars and take to newly asphalted roadways on motorcycles. They become chauffeurs (sopir in Malay) and office clerks, stenographers, laboratory assistants, and radio repairmen. They watch movies and pose for photograph after photograph. They lard their conversations with Dutch words and create new Malay/Dutch hybrids like maloeloos (shameless) and kesopiran (driverness). And they wear shirts and trousers and smart Dutch frocks. They also strike against the state railways, keep a wary eye for the colonial police, and dream of independence.	1
Mrázek's rich portrait of this fast-changing colonial world is built from an extraordinarily wide and eclectic range of primary sources, such as Ons Huis in Indië, a handbook for Dutch colonial housewives, and Sopir, a niche magazine for chauffeurs. As no other book has done, this one conveys the feel and flavor of modernity as it took root in early twentieth-century Indonesia.	2
But Mrázek has a larger project in mind. He seeks to connect the modernity of the early twentieth-century Indies to the crisis of late twentieth-century Indonesia and, indeed, the modern world in general. To do so, he says, he will "loosen time" (p. xvi) and, by invoking Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (along with Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault) will "make explicit … the insistent sense of late-colonial culture overgrowing into the post-colonial period and the present" (p. xvi).	. . .