This book explores how Indonesia is imagined differently by young people in the three cities of Jakarta, Kupang and Banda Aceh. Throughout the course of Indonesias colonial and postcolonial history, Jakarta, the capital, has always occupied a central position, while Kupang in East Nusa Tenggara and Banda Aceh in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam are located at the peripheries. The book analyses the convergences and divergences in how the country is perceived from these different vantage points, and the implications for Indonesia, also providing a new perspective to the classic and contemporary theories of the nation. By examining the heterogeneity of the imaginings of the nation from below, it moves away from the tendency to focus on the homogeneity of the nation, found in the classic theories such as Andersons and Gellners, as well as in more recent theories on every day and banal nationalism. Using the tenets of standpoint theory and Laclau and Mouffes theory of hegemony, the nation is acknowledged as an empty signifier that means different things depending on the positionality of the perceiving subject. The work appeals to scholars of nation studies and Asian and Indonesian studies, as well those interested in the empirical grounding of poststructuralist theories.

Stefani H.S. Nugroho is currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Psychology, Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta, Indonesia. Prior to this, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and a Fulbright-Scholar-in-Residence at Santa Fe College, US. She obtained her doctoral degree in sociology from the National University of Singapore. Her research interest revolves around the discursive constructions of the nation particularly in the postcolonial context or among minorities.

1 On Imagining a Nation.- 1.1 Emphasis on homogeneity and elites in the study of nationhood.- 1.2 Prevalence of homogeneous elite point of views in Indonesian Studies.- 1.3 Towards Heterogeneous Constructions of Everyday Nationhood.- 1.3.1 The construction of the nation.-  1.3.2 Standpoint Theory and Situated Imagining.- 1.4 Organisation of the book.- References.- 2 Nationalism and the Making of Indonesian Subjects.- 2.1 Precursors to Independence.- 2.2 Independent Indonesia as a Unitary State.- 2.2.1 Nation-building Narratives: Majapahit, The Youth Pledge and Pancasila.- 2.2.2. Early Challenges in Nation-Building.- 2.2.3 Guided Democracy and the end of the Sukarnos administration.- 2.3 The New Order: Stabilization and Homogenization.- 2.3.1 Military Style Homogenization.- 2.3.2 Education as the site of indoctrination.- 2.3.3 Building the national cultural identity.- 2.3.4 Uneven belongingness to Indonesia.- 2.3.5 The beginning of the end.- 2.4 The reform period.- 2.4.1 Decentralization.- 2.4.2 Gus Dur, Megawati, and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.- 2.5 Conclusion.- References.- 3.Methodology.- 3.1 The research sites: Jakarta, Kupang, and Banda Aceh.- 3.2 Methodological challenges.- 3.3 The Photo Elicitation Interview method.- 3.4 Selection of photographs and the interview process.- 3.4.1 Photographs used in the interviews.- 3.5 Note on analysis.- References.- 4.Imagining Indonesia from Jakarta.- 4.1 The Socio-Historical Context of Jakarta.- 4.2 The Inward Gaze: Building a chain of equivalence from diversity and disparity.- 4.2.1 The nationalization and essentialization of regional cultures.- 4.2.2 Politically and economically dependent periphery.- 4.2.3 The regions as negative space.- 4.3 The Outward Gaze.- 4.3.1 The Antagonistic Other: Malaysia.- 4.3.2 The Desirable Other: Affluent and Developed Countries.- References.- 5 Indonesia from the periphery: Imagining Indonesia in Kupang.- 5.1The Socio-Historical Context of Kupang.- 5.2 The Inward Gaze: Coexistence of Hegemonic and Counter-hegemonic Discourses.- 5.2.1 Reproductions of hegemonic narratives.- 5.2.2. Inhabiting the Negative Space: Do you know where Kupang is?.- 5.2.3 Questioning Hegemonic Meanings of Culture and Diversity.- 5.2.4 A Pragmatic Belongingness to the Nation.- 5.3 The Outward gaze: The absence of the international world as the Other.- 5.4 Summary and Conclusion.- References.- 6 Deconstructing Indonesia in Banda Aceh.- 6.1 The Socio-Historical Context of Banda Aceh.- 6.2 The Inward Gaze.- 6.2.1 Inhibiting the Negative Space: Aceh culture versus Indonesian culture.- 6.2.2 Two Perceptions on Aceh's Integration with Indonesia.- 6.3 The Outward Gaze: Aceh and the World.- 6.4 Summary and Conclusion.- References.- 7 Heterogeneous constructions of the nation: theoretical and practical implications.- 7.1 Plural imaginings from below: the centre and the peripheries.- 7.2. Multiple modes of Otherness.- 7.3 Multiple centers, plural dominant discourses.- 7.4 The nation as regularity in dispersion.- 7.5 The future of Indonesia as a common project?.