Media and Political Communication in Post-Suharto Indonesia

FAIN: FA-56499-12

Karen Strassler
CUNY Research Foundation, Queens College (Flushing, NY 11367-1575)

Since 1998, Indonesians have been engaged in a contentious struggle to grapple with their past and imagine their future. This project examines the public sphere that has emerged as a result of two interconnected processes: political liberalization and the diversification of the media ecology, particularly via new media forms that enable ordinary people to become the producers and disseminators of political messages. The outcome is a participatory public sphere, yet one pervaded by doubt, uncertainty, and intense longing for authority and authenticity. I examine this post-authoritarian condition through analysis of a series of public debates and perceived crises that hinge on the authority and authenticity of particular texts and images circulating via various media channels. After Authority will contribute to broad interdisciplinary conversations about democratic transitions, media and political communication, and the public sphere.

Associated Products

Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia (Book)
Title: Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia
Author: Karen Strassler
Abstract: The end of authoritarian rule in 1998 ushered in an exhilarating but unsettled period of democratization in Indonesia. A more open political climate converged with a rapidly changing media landscape, yielding a vibrant and volatile public sphere within which Indonesians grappled with the possibilities and limits of democracy amid entrenched corruption, state violence, and rising forms of intolerance. In Demanding Images Karen Strassler theorizes image-events as political processes in which publicly circulating images become the material ground of struggles over the nation's past, present, and future. Considering photographs, posters, contemporary art, graffiti, selfies, memes, and other visual media, she argues that people increasingly engage with politics through acts of making, circulating, manipulating, and scrutinizing images. Demanding Images is both a closely observed account of Indonesia's turbulent democratic transition and a globally salient analysis of the work of images in the era of digital media and neoliberal democracy. Strassler reveals politics today to be an unruly enterprise profoundly shaped by the affective and evidentiary force of images.
Year: 2020
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1478004691
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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