The City, the Body, and the World of Things

In late New Order Indonesia, industrialization generated among Jakarta’s intellectuals a sense of entrapment in an ‘onrushing century’ where the storm of progress had thrown their life into turmoil. What did it mean for them to find their urban experiences structured by this turmoil, which poet Afrizal Malna called an ‘architecture of rain’? Sensing that corporeal and material history may hold the key to this question, I look into why a section of New Order Jakarta’s intellectual class felt they were leading a hyper-fast, overheated life, and how they tried to come to terms with it. Focusing on thing-centred and embodied experiences, I use the tension between Jakarta’s social history and Afrizal Malna’s biography and literary work to spark a different understanding of contemporary Indonesian urbanism.