The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History

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Dorothy Fujita-Rony’s The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History examines the importance of women's memorykeeping for two Toba Batak women whose twentieth-century histories span Indonesia and the United States, H.L.Tobing and Minar T. Rony. This book addresses the meanings of family stories and artifacts within a gendered and interimperial context, and demonstrates how these knowledges can produce alternate cartographies of memory and belonging within the diaspora. It thus explores how women’s memorykeeping forges integrative possibility, not only physically across islands, oceans, and continents, but also temporally, across decades, empires, and generations. Thirty-five years in the making, The Memorykeepers is the first book on Indonesian Americans written within the fields of US history, American Studies, and Asian American Studies.

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Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. (1995) from Yale University in the Department of American Studies.
“This book makes significant contributions to Asian American studies, studies of empire and colonialism, US Cold War history, women’s history, and gender studies. Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony marshals a wealth of evidence from personal narratives and material culture to reveal how women’s “memorykeeping” constitutes a practice of resistance and critique. Her study illuminates the workings of multiple empires in the everyday life of two Toba Batak women, H.L. Tobing and Minar T. Rony, making visible the intertwined forces of gender and empire." - Valerie Matsumoto, University of California, Los Angeles

"Dr. Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony’s book, The Memorykeepers: Gendered Knowledges, Empires, and Indonesian American History, is an original and pioneering manuscript in the field of Indonesian American Studies. Particularly valuable is how the scholarship highlights women’s memorykeeping across time and space. A work of this importance is long overdue." - Shirley Lim, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Note on Orthography and Names
Introduction: Daughter of a Daughter: the Labor of Memorykeeping
 1 Questions
 2 The ‘Indonesian American’ Context
 3 ‘Return’ and ‘Belonging’

Part 1: Empire and Gender


1 Empires:Interimperialism, Migration, and the United States
 1 Introduction
 2 When Empires Came to You: the Toba Batak
 3 Multilingualism and Interimperial Temporality
 4 The United States Cold War
 5 Conclusion

2 Gendered Knowledges:Patriarchies and the Politics of Belonging
 1 Introduction
 2 The Toba Batak Culture as Political Location
 3 Colonial Domesticity
 4 Converging Gender Hierarchies
 5 Negotiation and Challenge
 6 Conclusion

Part 2: Curating Time


3 Stories and Silences: Telling the Past
 1 Introduction
 2 Searching for Archives
 3 What Is Said
 4 What Is Not Said
 5 Two Pictures
 6 Conclusion

4 Artifacts and Memories: Representing Meaning
 1 Introduction
 2 Knowledge as Legacy
 3 Memorykeeping as Response to Precarity
 4 The Labor of Artifacts
 5 Conclusion

Part 3: Memorykeeping


Prologue to Part 3: A Journey and a Path

5 Across Empires: The Narrative of H.L. Tobing
 1 Raja Pontas
 2 The Old Times
 3 Family
 4 The Adat
 5 Christianity
 6 Tarutung
 7 Living in the Village
 8 Dutch Rule
 9 Elementary School
 10 Salatiga
 11 Early Marriage
 12 Semarang
 13 Magetan
 14 Pearaja
 15 Bengkalis
 16 Japanese Occupation and World War II
 17 Kisaran
 18 Medan
 19 Progress
 20 Opportunities
 21 United States
 22 Homecoming

6 For Those Who Follow: The Autobiography of Minar T. Rony
 1 Beginnings
 2 Bengkalis
 3 Siantar
 4 Return to Bengkalis
 5 Bukit Batu
 6 Pearaja
 7 Jakarta
 8 Return to Siantar
 9 Medan
 10 Teacher and Guide
 11 The United States
Conclusion: The Urgency of Time
Timeline
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Institutes, libraries, specialists, students interested in U.S. social history, Asian American Studies, Indonesian diasporic history, Indonesian American history, women’s history, public history, history of U.S. empire, archives and memory
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