Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0294-027X
Abstract
This article discusses the inter-class and cross-oceanic ties envisioned by socialist women’s organization Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women Movement or Gerwani) through an analysis of their magazine, Api Kartini (AK). The magazine published fiction and non-fiction writings that reveal their affective impulse to build connection as they shared their observations of the women’s movement and labor in Indonesia and abroad. The magazine addressed middle-class women and wives, connecting them emotionally with women of the working class and women organizations across the oceans in their rejection to colonialism and feudalism and their fight for equal rights. This article aims to understand AK’s efforts to imagine and build an affective community while contextualizing its writings to the Indonesian archipelagic landscape and the Cold War. Viewing the texts through the concepts of affect, postcoloniality, and Sara Ahmed’s “sociality of emotions,” this article analyzes Api Kartini’s imagination of a world that “could have been” and its aspiration for a borderless space that is transnational yet local, political yet intimate, and ultimately contests the Cold War’s patriarchal and capitalist ideas of a globalized world. It also seeks to theorize “islandic affect” by analyzing literature in AK as Gerwani’s expression of cross-ocean interconnectedness and collective hope for a better life in the “Third World.”
Recommended Citation
Saraswati, Asri
(2026)
"Building Ties, Connecting Islands: Api Kartini's Longing for an Affective Community During the Cold War,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
50, Article 18.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2290
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss50/18
