Cigarette Girl , Netflix, and Soft Commodity Nationalism in Indonesia

With its 2023 Indonesian historical fiction series Cigarette Girl, Netflix sought to grow its market in the world’s fourth most populous country. Based on a novel by Ratih Kumala, the Netflix series sets personal drama and business intrigue against a historical backdrop of postcolonial nationalism, political violence, and rapid growth in the clove-laced tobacco cigarette (kretek) industry. The series condemns 1960s-era patriarchy and state-sponsored violence but ultimately creates a redemptive arc for the nation and positive representations of the kretek industry, disengaging from the political nature of state massacres and the tobacco-related diseases killing more than 250,000 Indonesians a year. Analysing the series as a ‘commodity nationalist’ text that closely identifies kretek with Indonesian national history and culture, this article illuminates how commodity nationalism – like other nationalist projects – entails forms of forgetting and exclusionary class, gender, and racial dynamics.