What happens when a minority group in a fraught, conflict-ridden colony finds itself a distrusted entity within the new nation-state, its sacrifices in the cause of national independence swept aside by suspicions that its members are not loyal to the emergent realities of majority rule? What happens when its members intermarry with the hated colonizers, or flee to the colonizers’ European land in search of work? What do terms like heritage and history mean to them, against the background drumbeat of an increasingly fierce nationalism?

Ana Dragojlovic's richly recounted, lovingly written, and often intensely moving ethnography explores the transnational anxieties of identity, using the concept of “post-colonial intimacy” to bring to the fore the conflicted situation of these doubly alienated transnational islanders in search of the assurance of familiar roots. Using a simple vignette of a film viewing, she brings us immediately into a visceral realization of the enormous emotional charge that accompanies any reminder of how much the Dutch enemy and the Balinese patriot found themselves sharing – an especially poignant realization, moreover, for those many Balinese who embraced the colonial society for the somewhat compromised security it offered them, and even more for the children of mixed marriages. What was this extraordinary sense of commonality that so many Balinese experienced in the Netherlands, a commonality that still generates a crisis of conscience for every Balinese who encounters it?

Rather than giving us an easy answer, Dragojlovic puts into play the concept of kebalian – of Balineseness – as something that changes shape and content as it moves from the Indonesian context to the Dutch. This is important because so often concepts of identity are presented, at least in official discourse, as rigid, clearly defined, and unchangeable. Think, for example, of the Thai projection of khwampenthai, “Thainess,” a concept that has been put massively to work in the service of national integration. For the Balinese, a defensive but proud minority amid a predominantly Islamic state, such a reification would make no sense. The cultural intimacy these deracinated people appreciate transcends the boundaries that they traverse, to merge in a sense of encompassing empathy with their former colonial masters – a guilty love, ruefully acknowledged, and with social and political consequences that today transcend geographical borders and the gaps between generations.