ABSTRACT
Indonesia has been engaged in a series of nation building efforts since winning its fight for independence from its former Dutch colonial rulers in 1949. This chapter examines one of hundreds of endeavours to establish new political and administrative units by splitting up or merging existing units that have been occurring in Indonesia since 1999. Reterritorialization and historical precedent were imitated, as was the nonattendance of the current heads of each area. Discourse relating to the reterritorialization of Cirebon received no further uptake until 11 August 2009, when a blogger, Eko Risanto, imitated fragments from all of the prior stories, while adding a whole host of new ones. The chapter explores how the ideas figured in the construction of a new semiotic configuration associated with discourses of reterritorialization. The subsequent imitations of these configurations are mediated by a host of other complex commentaries and evaluations that are occurring at other scales.
