Rudolf Mrázek. A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of Its Intellectuals. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 328 pp.

• Main Author: Cruz, Resto S., I
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2013
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/stjgs/vol1/iss2/5; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/stjgs/article/1042/viewcontent/ST_201.2_205_20Book_20review_20__20Cruz_20I.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Excerpt: This book attends to the quotidian experiences and articulations of and the possibilities engendered by colonial modernity in Indonesia through the recollections—at once fragile, vivid, lyrical, and recalcitrant—of elderly urban intellectuals. By weaving together the memories of these intellectuals, Rudolf Mrázek provides us with powerful, if fleeting, visions of how modernity, as a force, constituted and moved individuals, families, and a whole generation, neighborhoods and cities, and a whole nation. Movement here encompasses multiple dimensions: spatial, as when young men and women travelled to study in urban centers such as Bandung, Central Java, or for the more affluent ones, Leiden in the Netherlands; emotional, as when Mrázek’s interlocutors became affectively invested on speaking Dutch (later on, Bahasa Indonesia) and eating on time and together with one’s family as ways of distinguishing themselves as “modern”; relational, as when young urbanites learned how to interact as a group and in view of colonial racial hierarchies; and cognitive, most intensely demonstrated in the ways in which young intellectuals came to imagine their and Indonesia’s place in the world. Indeed, colonial modernity and its passing is marked in terms of space and mobility: from the intimate confines of houses, to neighborhoods and roads, to educational institutions and prisons, to the world at large.