Muggen Mensen Olifanten (1995) written by Marion Bloem is a collection of 57 travel narratives about journeys across the globe. It renders accounts of Africa, Latin America and the Unites States, but the emphasis is on South-East Asia, particularly on the Indonesian Archipelago. In these travel narratives, the autobiographical protagonist is described as an “Indo-Dutch” woman of the second generation, whose parents grew up in the Dutch East Indies and migrated around the time of Indonesia's decolonisation to the Netherlands. Bloem's journeys and perceptions of places and peoples of the Indonesian archipelago are in various ways informed by memories of her parents’ colonial past, a past she has not experienced herself.

In this chapter, I will build on Marianne Hirsch's notion of “postmemory” and explore Bloem's belated but intense negotiation with her parents’ colonial past as an imaginative and creative investment. I am particularly interested in untangling some of the ambivalences and tensions in the relation between Bloem's Indo- Dutch postmemory and the Indonesia she describes in her travel account. To be more specific, I will explore the tension between on the one hand, the political need to reaffirm Indo-Dutch postmemory against the background of contemporary multicultural Netherlands and on the other hand, its strategic function in asserting ethnographic authority over the Indonesian space and peoples described. Bloem's travel book is indeed marked by a strong ethnographic claim. Bloem's position of a cultural insider and expert is rhetorically construed by her continued differentiation from Western tourists and her knowing recognition of the staged authenticity for Western eyes. At the same time, her ethnographic expertise reiterates Dutch colonialism in its collapse of Indonesian history and the populations of the various islands. Central issues that will inform the discussion are the deployment of tropes of “anti-conquest” and “the antitouristic binary”, the insistence on reciprocity, cultural insiderism, the proficiency in Pasar Malay and the female exotic body.

The Spectre of Indo-Dutchness

Before we proceed with the analysis, it is worthwhile considering that to look into the connections between Indo-Dutchness as a mixed racial identity on the one hand and Indonesia as a cultural space on the one hand, asks for an understanding of the complex historical situation of Indo-Dutch populations in the colonial society of the Dutch East Indies as well as their status of a marginalised, even invisible, ethnic group within Dutch multicultural society today.