‘They Call Me Babu’: The Politics of Visibility and Gendered Memories of Dutch Colonialism in Indonesia

Abstract

The 2019 documentary film They Call Me Babu utilises historical film footage including the home movies of one Dutch family with a voiceover in Bahasa Indonesia to narrate the fictionalised experiences of a former female domestic worker in the colony of the Netherlands East Indies in the closing decades of Dutch colonial rule from 1939 to 1949. By centring the experiences of ‘babu’, women who worked as nannies and nursemaids for families holding European status, and giving the main character of the film agency, the Dutch-Indonesian director Sarah Beerends endeavours to make these women visible and to narrate their viewpoints. In this paper we argue, however, that the director’s aspiration to ..