Java Jazz: A Politics of Preservation

This dissertation draws upon ethnographic and archival research conducted in Indonesia, the Netherlands, the United States, and online from 2016 to 2022. I focus on four grassroots community popular music archives established between 2009 and 2016 in Malang, East Java (Museum Musik Indonesia), Surakarta, Central Java (Lokananta Project), Jakarta (Irama Nusantara), and Bogor, West Java/Chicago, USA (Arsip Jazz Indonesia). Each chapter examines the various roles and practices of Indonesian grassroots archivists in the organization, preservation, and circulation of materials related to jazz in Indonesia, ethnographically theorized through ideas of archival publics, archival value, archival (il)legibility, and archival care. I frame the grassroots archivists as activist archivists who circulate audiovisual media containing histories of Indonesian people and communities associated with modernity and cosmopolitanism outside of straightforward nation-building hero narratives. I consider how the political ideals of emergent archivists allow for the contemporary Indonesian public to reckon with new objects of archival value and reform public understandings of Indonesian cultural heritage as containing complex accounts of Indonesians, in this case jazz and popular musicians, interested both Indonesian nationalism and a conscious cosmopolitanism.

The surfacing of these grassroots archives coincides with the politics of post-Suharto Reformasi (1998–present), an era marked by liberal policies and increasingly pluralistic projects. The audiovisual archives create spaces for Indonesians to refashion themselves through liberal education and grapple with their own colonial, postcolonial, and global history through increased sonic access, audibility, and historical reverberations. These grassroots archives, as archives from below, provide a record of activities beyond those maintained in institutional archives, and in doing so the archivists translate commercial recordings understood as ephemeral into objects of archival value for the Indonesian public. The objects of archival value are then used to provide evidence of diverse ethnic and national cultural heritages, specifically I focus on the contributions of Chinese Indonesian and Dutch Indonesian jazz musicians to the contemporary Indonesian music industry and, more generally, to Indonesian cultural heritage. The microhistories of jazz in Indonesia do not only challenge state renderings of history maintained at state institutions, but more often disturb and sometimes support them, refiguring the orthodox national historiography as coexisting among many historiographical streams. Despite ongoing tensions and constraints of hegemonic co-optation, I determine the actions of these activist archivists carry with them the currents of political change towards a more conscious and diverse Indonesian public.