Manchester University Press Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia: 161 (Studies in Imperialism)

'Susie Protschky’s Photographic subjects is at the forefront of new studies of imperialism. Subtle and far-sighted, it analyses photography in relation to royalty in order to show how empire worked. This is an essential book for understanding modern Indonesian history.' Adrian Vickers, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Sydney ‘Photographic subjects is a meticulously researched, indispensable contribution to the study of photography, monarchy and imperialism. Susie Protschky’s argument that practices of making, collecting and circulating photographs played a crucial role in the formation of imperial subjects and imagined communities across the Dutch empire is powerfully and persuasively made.’ Karen Strassler, Associate Professor, Anthropology Department, Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center This book examines photography at royal celebrations during the reigns of Queens Wilhelmina (1898–1948) and Juliana (1948–80), a period spanning the zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It reveals how photographs taken at Queen’s Day celebrations were used to record the ritual functions of royal portraits in the colonies, and how albums became objects of exchange across colonial networks. Royal photographs associated the queens with colonial modernity and modes of governing difference across a discontinuous and ethnically diverse empire. As the book shows, they have strongly gendered and racial dimensions, in that they depict Wilhelmina and Juliana as female kings who related to their Dutch and Indigenous subjects in different visual registers. Advancing methods in the uses of photographs for social and cultural history, Photographic subjects reveals the entanglement of Dutch and Indonesian histories in the twentieth century and provides a new interpretation of Queens Wilhelmina and Juliana as imperial monarchs. Review 'It has taken historians a generation or two to come to terms with empire. Historians who lived during the age of empires tended to put the term imperialism in the too-hard basket. Those who lived through the end of empire appropriately, for the main, took the side of anti-imperialist nationalists. Susie Protschky's Photographic subjects is at the forefront of new studies of imperialism. While not doubting its moral illegitimacy, she explains how the Netherlands' colony of the East Indies imagined itself in relation to the Dutch monarchy. This is a subtle and far-sighted book, analysing photography in relation to royalty in order to show how empire worked. The visual binding of the colony to the mother country was, as she shows, carried out through an array of imagery that celebrated devotion to the absent ruler. Peace and war, tradition and modernity provided a range of sights revealing the nature of colonial subjecthood. This is an essential book for understanding modern Indonesian history.'Adrian Vickers, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Sydney 'A rich, carefully researched and innovative study of photography and monarchy in the Dutch Empire, Photographic subjects is a remarkable achievement. Protschky attends to image-making practices and the materiality of images to yield new insights into the relationship between monarchical authority, imperial rule and photography. Going beyond analyses of official portraits as props in state-sponsored spectacles, Protschky explores how people in the colonies responded to images of the queen though their own photographic practices. She presents an array of figures - colonial officials, local indigenous rulers, middle class Indo-European and Dutch colonists, Chinese associations and Javanese youth groups, among others - who posed next to the queen's portrait, took photographs of royal celebrations in the Indies, sent photographic albums as gifts to the queen, collected postcards and clippings related to the queen, and shared images commemorating royal events with distant family members in other parts o