Flâneur, Popular Culture and Urban Modernity: An Intellectual History of New Order Jakarta

Abstract

Using as a prism the symbiosis between flânerie and the consumption and production of popular culture, this article reconstructs the intellectual history of Jakarta’s encounter with economic modernisation under Indonesia’s New Order (1966–98). By analysing the life of novelist Teguh Esha (b. 1947) and his Ali Topan trilogy, the article highlights the popularly held ideas that mirrored and modulated Jakarta’s experience of New Order modernisation. These ideas suggest that, as a way of life and a system of government, the New Order failed to produce a modernity where people could feel at home. What it summoned into being in Jakarta was a modernity with “flies in the ointment”, such as social alienation, an overpowering sense of homelessness, unbridled corruption, general moral collapse and prostitution in various professions. Rejecting the New Order’s pragmatic modernism, a section of the city’s urban youth put together and practised ideological modernism, which manifested itself in Islamic revival, Muslim pop and heterodox Islam.