Militant Masculinity and Female Agency in Indonesian Nationalism, 1945–1949

“How do we seize the foreign past?” a character in Julian Barnes’s novel Flaubert’s Parrot asked. The answer was straightforward: “we read, we learn, we ask, we remember, we are humble; and then a casual detail shifts everything.” ¹ To do its transformative work, however, such a serendipitous detail must not only be noticed. It should also be identified as significant and provoke a sense of either curiosity or discomfort that cries out for analysis. But as many historians understand intuitively, what is an inconsequential feature in the eyes of one observer could emerge, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, as a striking fact that jumps out at a crucial moment, thus producing a major shift in a colleague’s attempt to seize the foreign past. ²