A satiric Indo literary genre inverted colonial stereotypes onto the elite

Evidence

Others took different tacks. Even in the mainstream press it was quickly becoming a new journalistic fashion to feature an article by someone who called himself an “Indo.” Between 1915 and 1935 dozens of novels, plays, and children’s stories portrayed poor Indos in distress and the colonial full-blooded elite in visual and verbal caricature as hairy, bulging, sweaty, middle-aged men. The emergence of Indo-European organizations and an active press animated a more vocal and contentious public debate. A sharply satiric edge, with starker political statements, were more in evidence as Indonesian nationalism congealed in more organized forms. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 999

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes theories of colonial mimicry and Bhabha’s colonial discourse reversal — the colonized caricaturing the colonizer.