Skip to content
Connect
Stories

Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia | Doreen Lee

People in this story

Doreen Lee, Associate Professor of Anthropology

In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of “Generation 98,” Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists’ experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present.

More Stories

The Pentagon is seen on Sunday, Aug. 27, 2023, in Washington.

Homeland security expert details what would a government shutdown mean for US national defense

09.29.2023

Dean’s Newsletter: Fall 2023

09.28.2023
The Google sign is shown over an entrance to the company’s new building in New York on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2023.

Google monopoly trial shows appetite for enforcement on Big Tech, antitrust experts say

09.29.23
Q&A