ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Indonesia’s recent institutional transformations reverberate in the changing relations between discursive and geographic centers and peripheries, affecting long-established boundaries between local versus regional languages and producing new semiotic registers for the spatiotemporal imagination of the Indonesian polity. Drawing on the Bakhtinian notion of chronotope—understood as a language-mediated organic interconnectedness of time and space—and on audiovisual data recorded in a peripheral region of upland Sulawesi, the chapter shows how the usage of a regional language (Toraja) and the deployment of formulas of anticolonial rhetoric are currently used to craft novel spatiotemporal forms of collective belonging and to convey enhanced oratorical agency. A series of textual examples drawn from recordings of political speeches are provided to exemplify what the author proposes to call a novel “vintage aesthetics of the margins,” that is, a selective and reflexive appropriation of linguistic and visual elements emblematic of a positively imagined periphery and nostalgically celebrated past. Besides undermining the authority of bureaucratic Indonesian, the deployment of linguistic “pastness” and the celebration of locality allow an aesthetic re-articulation of previous chronotopic representations of the Indonesian nation-state as a verticalized space fixated in the immobile synchronicity of an eternal present.
