...fair skin means work: women pull on gloves to ward off the sun before hopping onto their scooters, they refuse to go swimming before the sun is down, and they buy and use one or more of the ...hundreds of whitening creams and body lotions sold in stores or beauty clinics. Cosmetics companies such as Unilever and L’Oréal have huge Asian markets for skin-lightening creams, and market researchers predict that the demand in Indonesia for skin-whitening products will only grow in the coming years. Considering the importance of perceived ideals of skin color and the ways in which Indonesians identify and judge other Indonesians by physical features (such as slanting eyes, nose shape, and hair form), it is surprising that there is not a larger body of studies on race in Indonesia. Thanks to Ann Stoler and to those reacting to and reflecting on her work, we know how difficult it is to pin down the importance of race in relation to other indicators of difference—such as class, religion, or language—and how important it is to do that anyway.1 Scholars of postcolonial Indonesia have paid less attention to race, partly, perhaps, because of Suharto’s SARA policy, a ban on the public discussion of issues related to ethnic groups, religion, race, and other group-based interests, because they were considered a danger to public order.2 Only in studies of the position of people of Chinese descent in Indonesia and in critical studies of Papua has race been a concept of some interest. Saraswati shows how “whiteness” is now a desirable commodity without a determinate geographical boundary, and models of different mixed-race backgrounds and Asian countries appear on the pages of Cosmopolitan, the Indonesian version of the U.S. magazine that is central to this chapter.4 Like the original publication, the magazine in Indonesia sells messages of happiness and freedom combined with ideals of femininity and whiteness.
...think about feeling lucky, like in those opening lines of the Langston Hughes poem "Luck": "Sometimes a crumb falls/ From the tables of joy/ Sometimes a bone is flung." Epler is the president of ...New Directions and Chew is co-director of publicity; Weinberger--an essayist, editor, and translator, most notably of Octavio Paz--is the one who discovered the book, and Douglas, at the 2017 Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad in April 2017. (Peepal Tree is the major forum for Caribbean writers, with more than 300 books published since 1985, and where many of the writers Weinberger met at the festival have published, or hoped to be published.) He went to Douglas's reading and onstage interview, and was "simply knocked out" by this "panoramic novel that takes place on one corner of Kingston, Jamaica, full of characters, living and dead--from street vendors to historical figures like Marcus Garvey--presented in a multiplicity of voices, with a vibrancy of the English language that was new to me." The book is personal for Douglas, who came to the U.S. to study when she was 19, but came of age in Half Way Tree, which, she explains, is the crossroad in Kingston that separates uptown from downtown, with a clock in the tower that always tells the wrong time: "There's a square where Jamaicans come together, where politicians come to speak, and it's a meeting place of different people from different classes.
This fall, the Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan will have his North American debut with the publication of his novel, Beauty Is a Wound. The novel takes on dark episodes in Indonesia's ...history--including the anticommunist killings that took place there in the mid-1960s--while dealing playfully with the country's traditional folklore and myths.
From a family saga steeped in the culture of Barbados to a political drama set in Spain's Basque Country, this season's premier fiction debuts are as diverse in their settings as they are in their ...approaches to narrative form. Information about several debut books is presented.
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