AlterNations: Performing Indonesian communicability.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

"AlterNations: Performing Indonesian Communicability" argues that the heterogeneous plurality of the term "nation" is revealed through the certain ways a singular national language comes to be performed. By utilizing the term "alter-nations" this thesis demonstrates that performance is the condition of possibility for communicability and brings to the fore marginalized voices that destabilize the Indonesian national languages' totalizing intentions. The Indonesian national language is an invented language, an institutional political project that is disseminated throughout the vast archipelagic nation in order to practically achieve the Indonesian nation-state's ideology "Unity in Diversity." The process of promoting a standard and fixing a fragmented national space through an artificial unitary language inevitably produces tensions between the state and the ways in which Indonesian is expressed by its speakers and writers. This dissertation critically engages with varying performances of the Indonesian national language arguing that the paralinguistic features of language, such as sound and gesture, manifest the polyvocal dissonances that the state slogan "Unity in Diversity" silences.
The dissertation's introduction elaborates on the notion of "alter-nations" in relation to the Indonesian archipelagic landscape and the event of a national language. The first chapter looks at the process of fixing a national Indonesian language in dialogue with counter-public literary performances tracing the historical movement of language as it culminates in the 1998 revolution. The following chapters critically engage with specific Indonesian performances of paralanguage namely through feminist and queer interventions and counter-poetics. Finally, the epilogue visits the realm of aphasia and draws on Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude in order to further theorize the relationship between politics and language, unity and diversity, and the performance of communicability.