{"product_id":"a-certain-age-colonial-jakarta-through-the-memories-of-its-intellectuals-paperback","title":"A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of Its Intellectuals - Paperback","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eRudolf Mrázek\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eA Certain Age\u003c\/i\u003e is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth century, through the late colonial era, the national revolution, and well into independence after 1945, these intellectuals injected their ideas of modernity, progress, and freedom into local and national discussion.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhen Mrázek began his interviews, he expected to discuss phenomena such as the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. His interviewees, however, wanted to share more personal recollections. Mrázek illuminates their stories of the past with evocative depictions of their late-twentieth-century surroundings. He brings to bear insights from thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Proust, and from his youth in Prague, another metropolis with its own experience of passages and revolution. Architectural and spatial tropes organize the book. Thresholds, windowsills, and sidewalks come to seem more apt as descriptors of historical transitions than colonial and postcolonial, or modern and postmodern. Asphalt roads, homes, classrooms, fences, and windows organize movement, perceptions, and selves in relation to others. \u003ci\u003eA Certain Age\u003c\/i\u003e is a portal into questions about how the past informs the present and how historical accounts are inevitably partial and incomplete.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eBack Jacket\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn juxtaposing Indonesian and European voices from the 1930s to the 1990s, Rudolf Mrazek compels us to reconsider the unsettling because of contemporaneous origins and effects of modernity in the colony and metropole alike. In his highly textured and brilliantly edited interviews with aging urban revolutionaries, he shows how remembering the past entails recalling its traces archived and activated in voices animated by the noise of the street and the neighborhood, the music of salons and cinemas, the stuttering bursts of translations and trains, the routine hum of prison camp and classroom. They thus convey the force of a certain history that remains bound to yet irreducible to narration and analysis.--Vicente Rafael, author of\" The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRudolf Mrázek is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, including \u003ci\u003eEngineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eSjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia, 1906-1966\u003c\/i\u003e; and \u003ci\u003eBali: The Split Gate to Heaven\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 328\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.9 x 9 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eIllustrated:\u003c\/strong\u003e Yes\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e April 16, 2010\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52987844788531,"sku":"9780822346975","price":63.63,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0300\/5595\/6612\/files\/VcjTZ2CQoW9780822346975.webp?v=1769072280","url":"https:\/\/www.vysn.com\/products\/a-certain-age-colonial-jakarta-through-the-memories-of-its-intellectuals-paperback","provider":"VYSN","version":"1.0","type":"link"}