ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how women’s memorykeeping forges integrative possibility, not only physically across islands, oceans, and continents, but also temporally, across decades, empires, and generations. It focuses on how Gerhard L. Tobing and Minar T. Rony organized personal archival collections, and what this tells us about gendered knowledges that cross multiple empires. The chapter investigates how women’s memorykeeping, as well as the details of their lives, give us another view to consider the impact of empire, especially in the intimate realms of women’s private thoughts. Translation was a constant part of the environment in which operated as a researcher, both linguistic and cultural. Indonesian American history thus may be perceived as a story of ‘overseas Indonesians’ who have migrated away from the ‘homeland.’ Indonesian American community formation thus must be seen in the context of these larger global dynamics, especially given the specific cultural, economic, and political dimensions that result from our relationship to the US nation.
