The essays in this volume examine, from a historical perspective, how contested notions of modernity, civilization, and being governed were envisioned through photography in early twentieth-century Indonesia, a period when the Dutch colonial regime was implementing a liberal reform program known as the Ethical Policy. The contributors reveal how the camera evoked diverse, often contradictory modes of envisioning an ethically governed colony, one in which the very concepts of modernity and civilization were subject to dispute.

This incisive volume brings together postcolonial studies, visual culture and cultural memory studies to explain how the Netherlands continues to rediscover its history of violence in colonial Indonesia. Dutch commentators have frequently claimed that the colonial past and especially the violence associated with it has been 'forgotten' in the Netherlands. Uncovering 'lost' photographs and other documents of violence has thereby become a recurring feature aimed at unmasking a hidden truth. The author argues that, rather than absent, such images have been consistently present in the Dutch public sphere and have been widely available in print, on television and now on the internet. Emerging Memory: Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance shows that between memory and forgetting there is a haunted zone from which pasts that do not fit the stories nations live by keep on emerging and submerging while retaining their disturbing presence.

A famous Indonesian writer and feminist, Kartini (1879-1904) has been positioned at the forefront of nationalist and feminist movements in post-independence Indonesia, but the story of her struggle for equality has a global, and indeed, timeless reach. Appropriated by both local and international actors and institutions, including Dutch colonials, the Indonesian state, UNESCO and Eleanor Roosevelt, Kartini's memory has invariably been subjected to the political agendas and contestations occurring at key moments across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The eight essays in this volume, written by an interdisciplinary group of historians, literary scholars and anthropologists, trace the many ambiguities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and contradictions in Kartini's memory and iconicity by paying equal attention to both Western and Asian contexts. By analysing the stunning legacy of this brilliant, passionate and self-consciously aristocratic young woman who tried to write her way out of a world of colonial racism and Javanese sexism, Appropriating Kartini analyses one hundred years of colonial, national and transnational struggles over what it means to be a woman of colour in global modernity.