Visualizing entrenched historical trauma and inherited fear: a linguistic and semiotic landscape account of Jakarta’s traditional Chinatown Glodok

Abstract

Indonesia, for historical reasons, boasts one of the largest Chinese diaspora communities in the world. Glodok in Jakarta is one of the earliest Chinatowns in Indonesia. Historically, ethnic Chinese communities in Indonesia were subject to waves of discrimination and persecution. The anti-Chinese movements during Suharto’s New Order period (1966–1998) and the May 1998 Anti-Chinese Riots are but two more recent examples of this. As a result of various waves of anti-Chinese movements, ethnic Chinese Indonesians were forced to give up using Chinese names and were not officially allowed to study Chinese language. The linguistic and semiotic landscape of Glodok ‘Chinatown’ is a visual record of the vicissitudes of the Chinese community in Jakarta and Indonesia in general. This makes it interesting to explore the linguistic and semiotic landscape of Jakarta’s Glodok area. Drawing on a corpus of photographic data, this contribution illustrates how Glodok is a Chinatown like no other. That is, visually, unlike most Chinatowns in the world (where Chinese characters are highly visible and even celebrated and commodified as an important marker of Chinese-ness), Chinese is significantly backgrounded and even invisiblized in Glodok. Overall, Glodok is a Chinatown dominated by signs in Bahasa Indonesian (Indonesian). While now Chinese-language signage is no longer officially banned, there is still a sense of hesitation in using Chinese characters amongst the Chinese Indonesian community. This points to internalised trauma and inherited historical fear. Nevertheless, the essay shows that, while Chinese characters are relatively minimal, various semiotic/multimodal elements related to Chinese culture (e.g. red colour and other symbols) are visible. Overall, these various visual elements hint at a subdued and more nuanced sense of Chinese-ness, highlighting the nature of Glodok as a rather unusual Chinese enclave.

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