Title: Whose City? Imagining the Slum: Santising the Kampung. Semarang, 1900 - 1925Submitted by: Joost Cote, Deakin University, MelbourneColonial modernity manifested itself most strikingly in the colonial city. Here it stimulated both racial interaction and racial segregation; revealed the native flaneur and racial cross dresser (Schulte-Nordholt 1997, Siegel, 1997) but also the anonymous native kampung dweller and the prostitute. It brought the promise and the agony of a release from tradition, as Kartini so eloquently expresses, but also a reinvention and a reimposition of tradition. Focussing largely on the city of Semarang, the paper explores the parameters of a new morality defined by a colonial urban discourse. The paper argues that colonialists needed a new language to deal with the intimacy of the colonial urban space. In particular, it examines the way 'the slum' was used as metaphor for the modern colonial condition in a way which revealed and redefined 'the native' in modernity. The paper draws on the extensive writing of the Semarang polemicist for urban hygiene, H.F. Tillema, and the broader discourse on colonial urban health, hygiene and town planning focussed on Semarang to elucidate the colonialist and racial implications of this new discourse of urban reform. It concludes that the discourse of 'the slum' defined a new context and provided a new rationalisation for colonial intervention, one aligned to the broader 'ethical' direction of colonial reformism. Return to Abstracts menuCarol Burnett Phone: 61 - 3 - 9349 1899 Email: c.burnett@asialink.unimelb.edu.au
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