A seasoned and respected observer of Indonesia's contemporary cultural scene, Ariel Heryanto has written extensively on Indonesia's middle classes, ethnopolitics, and media. In this new book, he brings this far-ranging experience to bear on Indonesian popular culture, particularly but not only in relation to contemporary Indonesian screen culture (film and television, as well as electronic media). A key theme of Identity and Pleasure is that the collapse of Suharto's authoritarian New Order (1966–98) left a cultural and power vacuum that has resulted in an ongoing and highly unstable contestation over politics and identity. That contestation, Heryanto writes, is focused most consistently on new cultural forms aimed at urban middle-class youth; popular culture has become a critical site for “ideological battles to achieve a hegemonic position in the nation's power vacuum” (p. 12).
Consistent with the wide-ranging analysis for which he has long been renowned, Heryanto includes in his analysis not...