Java Jazz: A Politics of Preservation

This dissertation draws upon ethnographic and archival research conducted in Indonesia, the Netherlands, the United States, and online from 2016 to 2022. I detail four grassroots community popular music archives, Museum Musik Indonesia, the Lokananta Project, Irama Nusantara, and Arsip Jazz Indonesia, established between 2009 and 2016. This dissertation examines the role of Indonesian grassroots archivists in the collection, organization, preservation, and circulation of materials related to jazz in Indonesia. I frame the grassroots archivists as activist archivists who circulate audiovisual media containing histories of people and communities associated with modernity and cosmopolitanism in Indonesia. These people and communities have usually been recognized as outside of straightforward nation-building hero narratives, but the archival record reveals more complex accounts of Indonesian musicians and their relationships with Indonesian nationalism. I consider how the political ideals of emergent archives allow for the Indonesian public to reckon with and reform Indonesian cultural heritage to contain a more vast and varied popular music heritage that includes jazz.The surfacing of these grassroots archives coincides with the politics of post-Suharto Reformasi (1998–present), an era marked by liberal policies and increasingly pluralistic projects. The audiovisual archives create spaces for Indonesians to grapple with their own colonial, postcolonial, and global history through increased historical reverberations, transparency, and self-study. These grassroots archives, as archives from below, provide a record of activities beyond those maintained in institutional archives. The microhistories of jazz in Indonesia disturb, support, or challenge state renderings of history. The objects of archival value produced by the grassroots archivists are used to provide evidence of diverse ethnic and national cultural heritages, including Chinese Indonesian jazz musicians. I determine the actions of these activist archives, despite the tension and constraints of hegemonic co-optation, carry with them the currents of political change beyond the strictures of the state and capitalist music industry