Performing Power : Cultural Hegemony Identity and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia Performing Power illuminates how colonial dominance in Indonesia was legitimized maintained negotiated and contested through the everyday staging and public performance of power between the colonizer and colonized. Van der Meers Performing Power explores what seemingly ordinary interactions reveal about the construction of national racial social religious and gender identities as well as the experience of modernity in colonial Indonesia. Through acts of everyday resistance such as speaking a different language withholding deference and changing ones appearance and consumer behavior a new generation of Indonesians contested the hegemonic colonial appropriation of local culture and the racial and gender inequalities that it sustained. Over time these relationships of domination and subordination became inverted and by the 20th century the Javanese used the tropes of Dutch colonial behavior to subvert the administrative hierarchy of the state Frontmatter Contents Figures Acknowledgments A Note on Spelling and Terms Introduction. Performance of Power 1. Setting the Stage: The Javanization of Colonial Authority in the Nineteenth Century 2. Sweet Was the Dream Bitter the Awakening : Contested Implementation of the Ethical Policy 1901 1913 3. Disrupting the Colonial Performance: The Hormat Circular of 1913 and the National Awakening 4. Contesting Sartorial Hierarchies: From Ethnic Stereotypes to National Dress 5. East Is East and West Is West: Forging Modern Identities 6. Staging Colonial Modernity: Hegemony Fairs and the Indonesian Middle Classes Epilogue. Pawnshops as Stages of the Colonial Performance of Power Notes Bibliography