A Fatal Fiction: Projecting Pre-Capitalist Physicality Onto the Javanese Body in Two Regimes of Racial Capitalism

How did racialized ideas about work and rest change in the Dutch East-Indies towards the end of the nineteenth century? In the Dutch colony, the idea that Javanese worker showed a natural tendency for laziness and lacked the urge to improve their material condition was highly influential and repeatedly invoked to justify coercive labor practices. Whereas the Dutch used to consider Javanese’s alleged laziness as a stable and in-built feature of their inferior “race”, this study shows that they increasingly started to treat it as a by-product of their deplorable socio-economic circumstances by the turn of the century. Given that the Cultivation System (1830-1870) robbed the Javanese off the fruits of their own labor, the Dutch asserted that the natives had failed to develop the “natural” materialist urges they associated with industrial capitalism. In attempts to cure Javanese agricultural workers of their supposed indolence, the agents of capital therefore endeavored to inculcate...Show moreHow did racialized ideas about work and rest change in the Dutch East-Indies towards the end of the nineteenth century? In the Dutch colony, the idea that Javanese worker showed a natural tendency for laziness and lacked the urge to improve their material condition was highly influential and repeatedly invoked to justify coercive labor practices. Whereas the Dutch used to consider Javanese’s alleged laziness as a stable and in-built feature of their inferior “race”, this study shows that they increasingly started to treat it as a by-product of their deplorable socio-economic circumstances by the turn of the century. Given that the Cultivation System (1830-1870) robbed the Javanese off the fruits of their own labor, the Dutch asserted that the natives had failed to develop the “natural” materialist urges they associated with industrial capitalism. In attempts to cure Javanese agricultural workers of their supposed indolence, the agents of capital therefore endeavored to inculcate work ethic from above via the so-called Ethical Policy of 1901. This study not only documents this discursive change, but also aims to understand and explain it. To this end, it places the historical transformation of the stereotype against the background of the racial capitalist regime change it emerged from: the shift from a system in which natives were excluded from the White economy to one in which they were demanded to assimilate. My findings fill up the empirical lacuna on the circulation of this racial-economic trope in the late nineteenth century and advances the historiography on the topic by thoroughly embedding it within Black Marxist theorizing.Show less

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A Fatal Fiction: Projecting Pre-Capitalist Physicality Onto the Javanese Body in Two Regimes of Racial Capitalism