Doreen Lee, "Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia," (Duke University Press, 2016)

In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists' experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present.  Doreen Lee is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Northeastern University. Indonesian Student Movement Doreen Lee, Activist Archives Generation 98 in Indonesia End of Suharto Dictatorship Youth Activism in Indonesia Indonesian Political History 1998 Radical Student Movements in Asia Nationalism and Indonesian Youth State Violence and Activist Memory Youth Citizenship and Resistance Democracy in Post-Suharto Indonesia Indonesian Activism in the 1980s and 1990s Political Ethnography in Indonesia Indonesian History and Student Protest Northeastern University, Anthropology