What Does Post-Modernism Do in Contemporary Indonesia?

This paper historizes the recent vogue of post-modernist thought in Indonesia by relating that vogue to the cultural politics of the country's urban intelligentsia. The writer welcomes post-modernism, but with some serious reservations. He relates the contradictory political character of post-modernism to the position of the middle class in contemporary Indonesia. While the homology between the middle class and post-moderhism may well be global, the writer considers the specificity of the relation in the Indonesian case. No intellectual vogue in the past ten years has made as impressive a debut in contemporary Indonesian culture as post-modernism. A phenomenon of comparable significance, and closely related in issue, in the immediate past was the debate over socially engaged literary production and criticism in the early 1980s (Foulcher 1994, p. 66). The current controversy around post-modernism culminated during the second half