Strangers who are not foreign: Intimate exclusion and racialized boundary in urban Indonesia

This dissertation is an ethnography of the everyday paradoxes and politics of race between Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent and their non-Chinese counterparts, focusing specifically on the ways in which "Chinese-Indonesians" are racialized and ethnicized at intimate spaces of interracial exchange in urban Indonesia. Concerned to eschew popular uncomplicated assertions of "Chineseness" in Indonesia and Southeast Asia in general as either a self-proclaimed ethnic identity, a state-imposed racial category or simply a class privilege, this dissertation introduces a new approach to understand "Chinese-Indonesian" as the product of a long historical process as well as everyday cross-racial interactions through which Chinese cosmopolitan practices have gradually become congealed either in "diasporic" or "ethnic" spaces. It does so by examining the everyday politics of race and its intersection with class, ethnicity, nation, and gender formation in contexts such as urban criminality and security industry, domestic service, as well as state administered displacement and program of assimilation, finding in them a common formation of what this dissertation calls "intimate exclusion" that both produces and challenges ethno-racial difference and hierarchy between the Chinese and the non-Chinese in contemporary urban Indonesia. In doing so, this dissertation promises to provide a fresh theoretical framework that considers inter-racial intimacies and processes of exclusion as an entangled whole, thus allowing us to better get at the paradoxes and politics that the oxymoronic figurations of Chinese-Indonesians (e.g. Prameodya Toer's "strangers who are not foreign,") and overseas Chinese in general (e.g., Anthony Reid's "essential outsiders") currently seek to mediate, on the one hand, while on the other hand expanding the feminist and postcolonial studies' insight of how power exercises in and through, rather than outside of, social intimacies.