The Search for Sensuous Geographies of Absence Indisch Mediation of Loss

Abstract

This article explores how the descendants of migrants expelled from their originary homeland engage with geographies of loss, and how travel serves as an active process of mediation. My focus is on Indies (Indonesian-Dutch) migrants and their descendants living in the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Drawing on rich ethnographic material I explore how migrants' descendants associate colonial times and ancestral homelands with narrative strategies of exclusion and containment and tempo doeloe discourses (a nostalgic longing for the 'good old days') as generative of a collective victimhood. I seek to unravel how descendants explore agentic modalities of travel in order to..