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A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of its Intellectuals
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A Certain Age is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born unde
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Paperback, 328 pages
Published
April 16th 2010
by Duke University Press Books
(first published January 1st 2010)
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Start your review of A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of its Intellectuals
Poetic, imaginative, and engaging, but it's not quite a history so much as an ethnography. Mrazek tends to lose the lay reader with his verbose and heady quotations of foreign philosophers and abstractions that he imposes onto mundane phenomena.
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Huh... a unique book about Jakarta history. He interviewed elderly Indonesians (mostly elite/famous people) about their memories of childhood in the Dutch era. Then he arranged their comments by themes and medidiates on them with references to Kafka, Benjamin and others.
The book is not really setting out to prove any big idea. It's just exploring memory of space and describing what Jakarta was like in the 1990s compared to decades earlier. ...more
The book is not really setting out to prove any big idea. It's just exploring memory of space and describing what Jakarta was like in the 1990s compared to decades earlier. ...more
speed and lightness
I wrote some thoughts about this wonderful book here: http://wp.me/pJ3ez-6c Excerpt: “Speed and lightness over the mud and dust define the city and this observer of the city as well,” Mrázek writes in the book’s preface, and in the role of the observer he conjures up Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, but with a rushing twist. He is not just an idle passerby, doing a series of household interviews in Jakarta, sampling his informants like one might browse paintings in a gallery before ...more
I wrote some thoughts about this wonderful book here: http://wp.me/pJ3ez-6c Excerpt: “Speed and lightness over the mud and dust define the city and this observer of the city as well,” Mrázek writes in the book’s preface, and in the role of the observer he conjures up Walter Benjamin’s flaneur, but with a rushing twist. He is not just an idle passerby, doing a series of household interviews in Jakarta, sampling his informants like one might browse paintings in a gallery before ...more
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