Rudolf Mrázek
Biographic Data
| ID | 263700 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rudolf Mrázek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rudolf |
| FAMILY NAME | Mrázek |
| SIGNATURE | MRÁZEK R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Debate on Amir Sjarifoeddin: Politics and Truth in Indonesia, 1907–1948, by Rudolf Mrázek, with Henk Schulte Nordholt, Kankan Xie, Faizah Zakaria, and Rudolf Mrázek
The Complete Lives of Camp People: Colonialism, Fascism, Concentrated Modernity
Sjahrir at Boven Dlgoel: Reflections on Exile in the Dutch East Indies
H.J. van Mook, 1894–1965. Een vrij en gelukkig Indonesië, written by Tom van den Berge
On the dust jacket, in a sepia-soft photograph suggesting the old Indies, the lieutenant general sits at a low table about to sign the famous treaty.Only if one looks very closely one can see, on the wall above Van Mook, blurred, as if behind a veil, an oil painting, a portrait of Fatmawati, the beloved wife of Soekarno.In Van den Berge's book Soekarno likewise appears (along with his co-fighters, Hatta and Sjahrir, not to mention Tan Malaka, Moe…
Lenin of the Camps: Radical Translation in Colonial Digoel and Nazi Terezín
Boven Digoel was a camp in colonial Dutch East Indies where Indonesian communists were exiled for their participation in a failed revolution in 1927. Terezín was a Nazi-built camp in Bohemia for the European Jews. Lenin was read and quoted in both camps—in Dutch, German, Czech, and other languages. Only a few internees had a Moscow experience and read or quoted Lenin in Russian. This essay presents the camps as a moment of radical translation. It…
Thick Whisper and Thin Victory
This essay explores the acoustic regime of two twentieth-century internment camps: Boven Digoel (1927–43), in the Dutch East Indies, and Terezín or Theresienstadt (1942–45), in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, today the Czech Republic. Based on archival materials and interviews with survivors, this essay presents a detailed overview of sound, noise, music, and voice, as they were communicated, sent, received, and echoed through the c…
Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies
Michaela Budiman. Contemporary Funeral Rituals of Sa’dan Toraja. From Aluk Todolo to “New” Religions
Healing in Digoel
A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of Its Intellectuals
'A Certain Age' is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth c…
Floating. No gears shifting
It is impressive how, in Prasenjit Duara's essay, Asian regions are understood and presented-in the breadth of the world, not as objects with sharp edges, or compact entities of cultures, economies, and politics, not as blocks of which the present and the global so often are still thought to be made. Reading Duara's essay, I was made to think of the celebrated Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's current grand plan for Singapore, the epitome of Asi…
Boven Digoel and Terezín: Camps at the Time of Triumphant Technology
This is not a comparison between the colonial isolation camp for the Indonesian Communists and Nationalists at Boven Digoel, New Guinea, and the Nazi concentration camp for the European (including Dutch) Jews in Terezín, Bohemia. It is an effort to place both camps, as two working apparatuses, on the scale of development and refinement of modern technologies of belonging (and destruction); thus, the scale may be more clearly understood. Subchapte…
Engineers of happy land: Perkembangan teknologi dan nasionalisme di sebuah koloni
Literature or Revolution
Research Article| March 01 2006 Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis Rudolf Mrázek Rudolf Mrázek Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2006) 24 (1 (86)): 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-24-1_86-103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Rudolf Mrázek; Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis. S…
Bypasses and flyovers: Approaching the metropolitan history of Indonesia
Stupidity for Everyone. In Praise of the Latest Book by Avital Ronell. A Review Essay
The parts of a machine are elastic, indeed, flexible. But does this mean that there really isn't any mechanism at all, since the parts of the machine function as if made of butter? (And now think of a mechanism, say clock-works, made of materials which are far more flexible still than ours, so that the movements would be strangely irregular—would a mechanism like that have to be useless, or couldn't it actually be used?) —Wittgenstein, Last Writi…
Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony
Based on close reading of historical documents--poetry as much as statistics--and focused on the conceptualization of technology, this book is an unconventional evocation of late colonial Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia). In considering technology and the ways that people use and think about things, Rudolf Mrázek invents an original way to talk about freedom, colonialism, nationalism, literature, revolution, and human nature. The central…
Coughing Heavily: Two Interviews with Professor Resink in His Home at Gondangdia Lama 48A, Jakarta, on July 17 and July 25, 1997
Gertrudes Johan Resink was born in 1911 in Yogyakarta, Central Java to Dutch parents of Eurasian origin.The house of his parents became a gathering place for the "ethically minded" Dutch community there.Furthermore, several sons and nephews of the Sultan of Yogyakarta were sent there to acquire a "European" education.It was a strict school.Prince Puger (a Jogja cultural bureaucrat with kraton connections), one of the boarders there, told me about…
Bridges of Hope: Senior Citizens' Memories
One day in August 1999, when I had nothing urgent to do on my own project, I went to visit the "Collection of H. B. Jassin
Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam
A complex examination of "criminality" and "the criminal" as constructs and active presences in Southeast Asia. Contributors explore such themes as surveillance, incarceration, law and custom, secrecy, and corruption. A fascinating study of power and subversion in the modern postcolonial nation-state. Contributors include Daniel S. Lev, Henk M. J. Maier, Rudolf Mrazek, James T. Siegel, and others
Only the Deaf Hear Well
On August 16, 1969, Pramoedya Ananta Toer-a man who did not get the Nobel Prize in literature, but still might, who wanted to become an engineer as a boy, and, apparently, never will-after four years at Salemba prison in Jakarta, and a month in the transport camp at Nusa Kambangan, was put on a ship and set out to exile on the island of Buru 1,500 kilometers further east. To a historian of modern Indonesia the journey should be familiar. Thirty-f…
Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia
Tan Malaka: Just as Artisans, When Gathered Together
There has been, admittedly, apprehension over the past twenty years or so, about what if Helen Jarvis should finally make it. I thought of the beautiful trips of exploration, the searches for a chapter or a loose page from some Tan Malaka text, of the moments of victory, when, in Pasar Senen let's say, a market still of somewhat dubious fame for its fishy dealings, one might one day find, amidst pans, sandals, and old recordings, a stenciled thri…
Glass House, Takashi Shiraishi, and Indonesian Studies in Motion
The United States and the Indonesian Military, 1945-1965
Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony
Based on close reading of historical documents--poetry as much as statistics--and focused on the conceptualization of technology, this book is an unconventional evocation of late colonial Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia). In considering technology and the ways that people use and think about things, Rudolf Mrázek invents an original way to talk about freedom, colonialism, nationalism, literature, revolution, and human nature. The central…
Tan Malaka: A Political Personality's Structure of Experience
Literature or Revolution
Research Article| March 01 2006 Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis Rudolf Mrázek Rudolf Mrázek Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2006) 24 (1 (86)): 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-24-1_86-103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Rudolf Mrázek; Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis. S…
Bypasses and flyovers: Approaching the metropolitan history of Indonesia
Bridges of Hope: Senior Citizens' Memories
One day in August 1999, when I had nothing urgent to do on my own project, I went to visit the "Collection of H. B. Jassin
Tan Malaka: A Political Personality's Structure of Experience
The United States and the Indonesian Military, 1945-1965
Tan Malaka: Just as Artisans, When Gathered Together
There has been, admittedly, apprehension over the past twenty years or so, about what if Helen Jarvis should finally make it. I thought of the beautiful trips of exploration, the searches for a chapter or a loose page from some Tan Malaka text, of the moments of victory, when, in Pasar Senen let's say, a market still of somewhat dubious fame for its fishy dealings, one might one day find, amidst pans, sandals, and old recordings, a stenciled thri…
Glass House, Takashi Shiraishi, and Indonesian Studies in Motion
Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia
Only the Deaf Hear Well
On August 16, 1969, Pramoedya Ananta Toer-a man who did not get the Nobel Prize in literature, but still might, who wanted to become an engineer as a boy, and, apparently, never will-after four years at Salemba prison in Jakarta, and a month in the transport camp at Nusa Kambangan, was put on a ship and set out to exile on the island of Buru 1,500 kilometers further east. To a historian of modern Indonesia the journey should be familiar. Thirty-f…
Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam
A complex examination of "criminality" and "the criminal" as constructs and active presences in Southeast Asia. Contributors explore such themes as surveillance, incarceration, law and custom, secrecy, and corruption. A fascinating study of power and subversion in the modern postcolonial nation-state. Contributors include Daniel S. Lev, Henk M. J. Maier, Rudolf Mrazek, James T. Siegel, and others
Bridges of Hope: Senior Citizens' Memories
One day in August 1999, when I had nothing urgent to do on my own project, I went to visit the "Collection of H. B. Jassin
Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony
Based on close reading of historical documents--poetry as much as statistics--and focused on the conceptualization of technology, this book is an unconventional evocation of late colonial Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia). In considering technology and the ways that people use and think about things, Rudolf Mrázek invents an original way to talk about freedom, colonialism, nationalism, literature, revolution, and human nature. The central…
Coughing Heavily: Two Interviews with Professor Resink in His Home at Gondangdia Lama 48A, Jakarta, on July 17 and July 25, 1997
Gertrudes Johan Resink was born in 1911 in Yogyakarta, Central Java to Dutch parents of Eurasian origin.The house of his parents became a gathering place for the "ethically minded" Dutch community there.Furthermore, several sons and nephews of the Sultan of Yogyakarta were sent there to acquire a "European" education.It was a strict school.Prince Puger (a Jogja cultural bureaucrat with kraton connections), one of the boarders there, told me about…
Stupidity for Everyone. In Praise of the Latest Book by Avital Ronell. A Review Essay
The parts of a machine are elastic, indeed, flexible. But does this mean that there really isn't any mechanism at all, since the parts of the machine function as if made of butter? (And now think of a mechanism, say clock-works, made of materials which are far more flexible still than ours, so that the movements would be strangely irregular—would a mechanism like that have to be useless, or couldn't it actually be used?) —Wittgenstein, Last Writi…
Bypasses and flyovers: Approaching the metropolitan history of Indonesia
Engineers of happy land: Perkembangan teknologi dan nasionalisme di sebuah koloni
Literature or Revolution
Research Article| March 01 2006 Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis Rudolf Mrázek Rudolf Mrázek Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2006) 24 (1 (86)): 103–125. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-24-1_86-103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Rudolf Mrázek; Literature or Revolution: Writing Robust in a Postcolonial Metropolis. S…
Boven Digoel and Terezín: Camps at the Time of Triumphant Technology
This is not a comparison between the colonial isolation camp for the Indonesian Communists and Nationalists at Boven Digoel, New Guinea, and the Nazi concentration camp for the European (including Dutch) Jews in Terezín, Bohemia. It is an effort to place both camps, as two working apparatuses, on the scale of development and refinement of modern technologies of belonging (and destruction); thus, the scale may be more clearly understood. Subchapte…
A Certain Age: Colonial Jakarta through the Memories of Its Intellectuals
'A Certain Age' is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth c…
Floating. No gears shifting
It is impressive how, in Prasenjit Duara's essay, Asian regions are understood and presented-in the breadth of the world, not as objects with sharp edges, or compact entities of cultures, economies, and politics, not as blocks of which the present and the global so often are still thought to be made. Reading Duara's essay, I was made to think of the celebrated Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's current grand plan for Singapore, the epitome of Asi…
Healing in Digoel
Producing Indonesia: The State of the Field of Indonesian Studies
Michaela Budiman. Contemporary Funeral Rituals of Sa’dan Toraja. From Aluk Todolo to “New” Religions
Thick Whisper and Thin Victory
This essay explores the acoustic regime of two twentieth-century internment camps: Boven Digoel (1927–43), in the Dutch East Indies, and Terezín or Theresienstadt (1942–45), in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, today the Czech Republic. Based on archival materials and interviews with survivors, this essay presents a detailed overview of sound, noise, music, and voice, as they were communicated, sent, received, and echoed through the c…
H.J. van Mook, 1894–1965. Een vrij en gelukkig Indonesië, written by Tom van den Berge
On the dust jacket, in a sepia-soft photograph suggesting the old Indies, the lieutenant general sits at a low table about to sign the famous treaty.Only if one looks very closely one can see, on the wall above Van Mook, blurred, as if behind a veil, an oil painting, a portrait of Fatmawati, the beloved wife of Soekarno.In Van den Berge's book Soekarno likewise appears (along with his co-fighters, Hatta and Sjahrir, not to mention Tan Malaka, Moe…
Lenin of the Camps: Radical Translation in Colonial Digoel and Nazi Terezín
Boven Digoel was a camp in colonial Dutch East Indies where Indonesian communists were exiled for their participation in a failed revolution in 1927. Terezín was a Nazi-built camp in Bohemia for the European Jews. Lenin was read and quoted in both camps—in Dutch, German, Czech, and other languages. Only a few internees had a Moscow experience and read or quoted Lenin in Russian. This essay presents the camps as a moment of radical translation. It…
Sjahrir at Boven Dlgoel: Reflections on Exile in the Dutch East Indies
The Complete Lives of Camp People: Colonialism, Fascism, Concentrated Modernity
History (14 works) · Asian Studies and History (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Indonesia (6 works)