Crossover Politics: Spatiotemporal images of the nation-state and the vintage aesthetics of the margins in Post-Suharto political oratory. Transnational neoliberal democracy and the vintage aesthetics of the margins in Post-Suharto political oratory.

This work draws on Bakhtin’s (1981) insights on the organic interconnectedness of time and space, what he called chronotope, to explore how new styles of political oratory may produce fundamental re-articulations of the spatiotemporal representation of the nation-state in contemporary Indonesia. In the late 1990s, a global financial crisis impacted Indonesia’s economy. The New Order regime led by President Suharto came to an abrupt closure after three decades of authoritarian rule and Indonesia underwent a major transition from state-led development to a decentralized system managed through neoliberal policies (Peluso et al. 2008). Drawing on audiovisual data recorded in a peripheral region of upland Sulawesi, I examine the re-articulation of the interplay between speech forms and forms of political rationality that followed this institutional shift. My analysis focuses on the emerging aesthetics of “the vintage” and “the peripheral.” I discuss how the usage of regional language (Toraja) and the deployment of formulas of anticolonial rhetoric are currently used to craft novel spatiotemporal forms of collective belonging and convey enhanced oratorical agency. Indeed, besides undermining the authority of bureaucratic Indonesian, the deployment of linguistic “pastness” and the celebration of locality allow an aesthetic re-articulation of the New Order’s chronotopic representation of the nation-state as a spatial entity capable of “vertically encompassing” local communities (Ferguson and Gupta 2002) and existing in the immobile synchronicity of an eternal present (Pemberton 1994). At a more general level, through framing political discourse as a site for examining the shifts in the politics of locality and temporality in our contemporary changing world, this case brings the focus on situated communicative interaction to bear on the study of the zones of cultural friction (Tsing 2005) underlying the global processes of late capitalism.