Organizer: Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University

Type/Location: In Person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a book talk by Chiara Formichi, H. Stanley Krusten Professor of World Religions in the Department of Asian Studies.

Abstract:

Domestic Nationalism argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia’s progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women’s labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens. 

The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women’s traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work.   

The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests.

About the Speaker:

Chiara Formichi is the H. Stanley Krusen Professor of World Religions’ Director of the Religious Studies Program, and Professor in Asian Studies, at Cornell University. She specializes on Islam in Southeast Asia. Her research and publications focus on the intersection of religion and politics in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia, and on the relationship between Islamic Studies and Asian Studies. She has published two single-authored books, edited five volumes or special issues, and over 20 journal articles and book chapters. Chiara’s third monograph, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia is forthcoming in October with Stanford University Press.

Registration:

To attend the event in person, please register here.