Indonesia Study Group: Abstracts

12:30–2:00pm
March 11 2009
Seminar Room B (Arndt Room)

Performing Indonesia Abroad 1950-65
Jennifer Lindsay (South East Asia Centre, ANU)

During Soekarno‘s regime, cultural diplomacy was a vital part of the nation’s statement of international identity. The government sent abroad numerous official cultural missions, which consisted of large groups of dancers and musicians from all over Indonesia who toured for months at a time. The missions became increasingly frequent over the late 1950s and early 1960s. Artists toured communist and non-communist countries, including the USSR and Eastern Europe, China, Egypt, Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaya, and the United States. These official missions were one aspect of Indonesia’s cultural internationalism of this period. My paper discusses these cultural missions in the context of Indonesia’s cultural history of the 1950-65 period. The research for this paper forms part of the Australian-Dutch-Indonesian collaborative project “The Lost Legacy: Indonesia’s Cultural History 1950-65”.