NEWS & EVENTS
Appliable Linguistics Seminar 46
(Seminar on Language Science and System Science 112)
Time: 15:00, 6 December 2017
Venue: #304, School of Foreign Languages
Speaker: Dr. Huan Changpeng
Title: The Image of Chinese Indonesians in Indonesian News in Post-Suharto Era: From Ethnic Othering to Accommodation
Abstract: It is widely accepted that the ethnic minority group of Chinese Indonesians in Indonesia has suffered from prolonged discrimination, especially in the periods of the Old Order (1945-1966) and the New Order (1966-1998). The notorious May Riots in 1998 in Indonesia has even witnessed unprecedented ethnic massacres targeting Chinese Indonesians. The riots became a critical moment and arose awareness of the ethnic Chinese to redefine their ethnic identity. The commencement of the Reform Era (1998-now) marked an official recognition of the ethnic identity of Chinese Indonesian recorded in the national census and new accommodative regulations. That is to say, the image of Chinese Indonesians in Indonesian has gradually shifted from alien Other to accommodative Us. However, research on othering and accommodating Chinese Indonesians has tended to primarily focus on (discriminatory) regulations and laws at a macro level. This macro perspective is insufficient to gain insight into understanding how practices of othering and accommodating Chinese Indonesians are constructed in a wider nexus of practice. This is because on one hand social stigma of Chinese Indonesians has been so entrenched that lifting discriminative laws could only partially assist to accommodate Chinese Indonesians, which has been evidenced in continuous resistance from lower-rank government staff. On the other hand, the agent-setting and attitude mediation roles of Indonesian mainstream media have been integral to transmit, sustain and change the image of Chinese Indonesians. Such discursive practices have however been largely neglected in understanding the status quo of Chinese Indonesians. In view of that, we intend to examine the ways Chinese Indonesians are gradually constructed as part of Us after the Reform was launched in 1998. To do so, it draws on a corpus of news reporting in relation to Chinese Indonesians in the Jakarta Post and adopts the APPRAISAL framework (Martin and White, 2005) to investigate the diachronic changes of ATTITUDE towards Chinese Indonesians. The corpus findings will be explained in the context of changing social conditions in Indonesia. The research aspires to contribute to correcting the social wrong by unveiling and demystifying the discursive processes through which the ethnic Chinese are othered and later accommodated in Indonesia.
