An Imperial Snapshot: Colonial Anxiety and Picture Postcards in Early c.20 Indonesia

This article examines the concept of colonial anxiety through the prism of printed postcards sent from the colonial Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, during the early twentieth century. The argument is that picture postcards featuring colonial images or scenes act as multimodal forms of communication, allowing the sender to promulgate colonial-imperial assumptions while sending an often-banal tourist message to friends and family back home. The study approaches the topic by examining the postcolonial exchange in terms of a symbolic structure through which the coloniser and the colonial society produce symbolic knowledge, through items such as picture postcards, to portray their authority and knowledge of the colonised other. This is contextualised with the Lacanian understanding of structural anxiety to demonstrate the slippage which occurs when symbolic knowledge breaks down. Finally, this article calls for a more inclusive debate on colonial anxiety, drawing attention to the relative lack of definition of the term and the tendency for certain former colonies, such as Indonesia, to be excluded from discussion in favour of the oft-used South Asian example.