Colonial protest slogans can encode ambiguity the archive erases

Evidence

But what was this outcry, “Samoanja radical,” which seems to have captured a bilingual jeu de mot, a Dutch Malay play on words, embedded in the phrase? The Malay word “samoanja” (or semuanja) literally means “they’re all,” or “everything is,” which is clear enough. But “radical,” in mid-nineteenth-century Indies Dutch had two distinct referents: one, to “radical,” in the more familiar political sense; and two, to the “Radikaal” (sometimes spelled “radicaal”), that despised diploma for entry into the elite ranks of the civil service, granted only by the academy in Delft. It was of course abolition of the Radikaal that was the principal subject of the next day’s planned assembly. Whether “Samoanja radical,” as shouted on the streets of Batavia in 1848, meant “everything is about the diploma,” or “everyone should be able to get the diploma,” or “they’re all radical” (the most unlikely) is impossible to say. There was no further mention of the phrase. It disappears from the archive, as does its rich ambiguity and bivalence from Indonesia’s colonial history of dissent. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 555

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the double meaning of ‘radical’ — political radicalism versus the Radikaal civil-service diploma — which is the entire load-bearing ambiguity of the slogan.
• XREF: Connects to the rhetoric of subaltern studies and the question of what colonial archives can and cannot preserve about indigenous dissent.