Mrs Indah Wahyu Puji Utami1
1National Institute of Education, , Singapore, 2Universitas Negeri Malang, Malang, Indonesia
Representations of war in educational contexts have drawn the attention of scholars. A lot of research has been done on the representation of the World War II (WW II) in history textbooks in Europe and East Asia, including multiple perspectives on controversies of the war, the portrayal of heroes and victims, and the use of textbooks to create a national collective memory. However, fewer studies have been done on the representation of wars after WW II in history textbooks, including the independence war that occurred in Indonesia from 1945-1949. The Battle of Surabaya which started in October 1945 is an important episode of war in which the British fought against Indonesians just few months after Sukarno proclaimed independence. The key questions asked in this paper are how are the British in the Battle of Surabaya represented in Indonesian history textbooks? Why are they represented this way? Using a postcolonial framework and Fairclough’s model of discourse analysis of nine Indonesian history textbooks from 1950’s to 2017, I will argue that the representation of British in the battle of Surabaya in Indonesian history textbooks is not monolithic, nor static. This is due to the development of Indonesian historiography and the politics of education that has changed over time.
Biography:
Indah Wahyu Puji Utami is a Ph.D. student at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her research topic is the discourse of 1945-1949 war on Indonesian and Dutch history textbooks. She also works at History Department, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia.