On the Significance of the New Indonesian Regime and the Need to Revitalize Decolonial Critique: A Conversation with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann

Today, Sunday morning, October 20, former general Prabowo Subianto is being sworn in as Indonesia’s new president. We release a conversation we had earlier this month with Intan Paramaditha and Michael Vann about the road leading up to this inauguration, beginning in the 1960s with the Suharto regime.  Prabowo is a strong-arm authoritarian figure with a bloody record of human rights violations, yet he has remade his image as a cuddly, elder populist figure.  We spend some time talking about how his regime is likely to continue, if not accelerate, aggressive and brutal economic development policies that have wrecked the environment and displaced Indigenous peoples.  We talk a lot about how both the Indonesian media and some of its art world has been enlisted to promote this regime, and how decolonial feminists and others have taken on the task to both resist and present, and embody, other ways of being through listening to and engaging with voices from outside Jakarta and the liberal elites.

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian writer and an academic based in Sydney. She received her Ph.D from New York University and is now a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University. Her fiction, academic, and activist works focus on decolonial feminism and the politics of travel and mobility. She is the author of Apple and Knife and The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK, translated by Stephen J. Epstein). Her fiction has been translated into English, Polish, Turkish, German, and Thai. Intan’s latest books are the novel Malam Seribu Jahanam (GPU 2023) and the co-edited volume The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge 2024). She is the co-founder of the feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP/ The School of Women’s Thought).

Michael Vann has a Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz and is a professor of world history at Sacramento State Univesity who specializes in the history of imperialism and the Cold War, with special attention to Southeast Asia. Mike’s hometown is Honolulu, Hawai’i, and he has taught at universities in Indonesia, Cambodia, and the People's Republic of China. Among his publications are The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam and articles on race, film, empire, genocide, pandemics, the politics of Korean zombies, and the political economy of surfing in publications ranging from the Journal of World History and Historical Reflections to Jacobin and The Diplomat. He is currently writing an analysis of depictions of Cold War era mass violence in Indonesia, Vietnamese, and Cambodian museums. Since 1990 Mike has been trying to spend as much time as he can in Indonesia.

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