Blackface and brownface in Indonesia and Singapore

This article was first published in ERIF Sinterklaas Brand & Product Study 2020: 5 Years of Monitoring Blackface in the Market, 2020. 

On a clear day a decade ago [2009] in East Java, where my grandparents were from, I found myself watching a carnivalesque procession of floats and performers of all ages, dressed up in marvellously colourful and shiny costumes. Behind a truck carrying a dozen heavily made up secondary school students were a group of men, painted shoe-polish black, with fabric leaves around their waists. I asked a relative beside me to explain this: “This group represents the transfer of mysteries from Irian Jaya,” he said, and I remained mystified.

A reog procession in Ponorogo, East Java in 2009.
Photo by author.

Only a year later, I would arrive to study and live in the Netherlands, discover the ‘tradition’ of Zwarte Piet. I did not make the connection until one day, at the annual concert of my academic institution, a group of students from Indonesia performed a variety of ethnic dances from their archipelago. Decked in costumes borrowed from the embassy, they demonstrated dances representing Sumatra, Java and Bali.

From video 'Yamko Rambe Yamko'

For their final piece, four male students appeared in pitch black full body leotards and paint marks on their faces, accessorised with raffia skirts. Halfway through, I realised that the grunting dance was meant to represent Papuans. An Indonesian friend who witnessed this performance too later told me that every 5th of December, people in her hometown in Ambon – who speak a creole inflected with Dutch words – dress up as Sinterklas, Suarte Pit (also known as Om Pit (Uncle Pete) or Pit Hitam (Black Pete), fairies and clowns (see Goppel, 2016 for a video).

From video 'Sie Gins Kom de Stoomboot - Sinterklaas Op De Molukken: Ambon'

In 2008, I was attending a conference on critical Islam when the conversation veered to the colonisation by Muslims of other peoples. I asked an Indonesian man in our group about colonisation of Papua and incidents of forced conversion happening there. His defence: “But they are a little primitive, backward, you know?”

Blackface and brownface in Asia

In American cultural history, blackface is used to portray racist stereotypes of African Americans through performances. As a representation of a ‘subservient black body’ lacking in intellect, coordination and other virtues, blackface is an ‘imposed conceptualising representation’ that has travelled across the globe (Reyes, 2014).

Ad for Dunkin Donuts in Thailand

In Asia, some recent incidents of blackface in print and television advertisements in Thailand (Dunkin Donuts in 2013), Japan (Astigu pantyhose in 2014) and Malaysia (Watsons in 2017) caused major backlash online. In Japan, African-American writer Baye McNeil led a campaign to remove blackface performances in 2015. In each incident, the initial defence was that the ‘local’ use of blackface does not having racist intentions, but a look into the country’s history reveals economic and political connections with colonial powers.

The Euro-American discourse on Black people has shaped the discourse in Asia more than actual encounters with Black people (Fukushima, 2011). This is seen in the influence of European and Hollywood films and minstrel shows in different countries. As cuisines from the colonies transferred to the metropole (Kuipers, 2017), cultural influences like Zwarte Piet and minstrel shows travelled to the colonies. In 1887, the year of the 50th anniversary of the accession of Queen Victoria, one of the celebrations in the British crown colony of Singapore was a costume race that included racial caricatures of ‘native’ communities of Chinese, Malay and Tamils as well as blackface.

A 1935 photo of Singaporeans in blackface republished in a 1980 Straits Times column.
National Library archives.

 Minstrel parties and groups were common in the 1930s. Each neighbourhood had their own minstrel group that performed at events, parties and weddings. Until the late 1980s, American and British minstrel performances were popular, available ‘live’ in theaters and on television, and described as “good family entertainment” (Kaur, 2019).

Closely related to the practice of blackface is brownface: the portrayal of racist stereotypes of Indians and other ethnic minorities by artificially darkening the skin, using visible ethnic or religious markers such as the turban, and adopting an “Indian accent” which involves head-shaking and rolled ‘R’s. The diversity of Indian ethnic groups like Punjabis, Bengalis, and Tamils are all collapsed into a homogenising, offensive stereotype.

Some Singaporeans had taken great offense at the use of brownface in the film Gunga Din (1939) and comedy Short Circuit (1986). However, in the last decade, there have been incidents of brownface that included corporate Bollywood parties, YouTube channels, and state media (Veerasamy, 2019). These have mostly gone unchallenged, and brownface was declared by government bodies to be “insensitive” but not illegal (Kaur, 2019). Tradition is not innocent either: in Malay folklore exists a blackface bogey man called Orang Minyak (‘oily man’), who commits voyeurism and abduction of young women under the cover of night.

Performing racial supremacy and inferiority

Showing minority populations with a history of racial oppression as varying combinations of primitive, backward, stupid, ignorant serves the discursive strategy of keeping them subordinated. The same processes occur globally, whether as a result of information flow and exchange with former or current colonising countries, or as a proven technique for keeping minority populations subordinated and establishing racial superiority both “on and off-stage” (Reyes, 2014).

The racial dynamics of non-White societies such as those in Latin America, the Caribbean (see Bonilla-Silva, 2004). and most of Asia, has gone largely unstudied and unanalysed. Within a discourse of white supremacy, the “reality and politics of a middle-racial category” can show us new ways of identifying and analysing racial interests.

Because the discourse of a ‘Black-White’ racial order is so pervasive, one of the common defences of societies without any majority White populations is that racism simply does not exist. However, the examples above have shown that while White racial supremacy exists globally, a similar, parallel process manifests in different forms as linked to local racial interests. Hence, the dominant group in a society will often enjoy economic, political, social and cultural privileges – all while also being linked to how near to Whiteness they can attain i.e. honorary White (Bonilla-Silva, 2004).

Just as the historical legacies of Black peoples are marked by “slavery, gender-specific servitude, conquest, legal segregation, colonisation, and socioeconomic peonage” (Reyes, 2014), so are the bodies of Brown and other racialised groups today in different ways and to different extents according to their contexts.

The colonised colonises: case of Indonesia

The Indonesian case illustrates all the above processes. Under Dutch colonisation, the practice of blackface was documented in the 1890s when a Malay-language commercial theatre group Komedie Stamboel performed stories from A Thousand and One Nights, which included a ‘black-amoor’ character meant to represent an African slave. As this actor announced the next night’s play (as per theatrical tradition), he used “broken Dutch mimicking an African” mixed with malapropisms, Malay and low Javanese words (Tjerimai, 15 November 1893; in Cohen, 2004).

In 1945, the new Indonesian republic declared independence from the Netherlands and claimed the entire territory of the former Dutch East Indies. What was Western New Guinea remained under the Dutch until the mid-1960s, when a controversial referendum resulted in the Indonesian annexation of the region. Thus in 1962 with the New York Agreement it became the province of Irian Jaya and was later renamed to Papua and West Papua in 1999 (the eastern half of the island being independent Papua New Guinea). Organisasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement, or OPM) was established by West Papuan nationalists, who rejected the compromised referendum.

Blackface and racist stereotypes of Papuans justify economic exploitation through extraction of natural resources. Papua houses Grasberg, the world's largest gold mine and third largest copper mine. It is operated by Freeport Indonesia since 1973, a subsidiary of US-owned Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold. The mine dumps waste in the deltas and rivers, destroying food sources and degrading the environment. Military and police oppression, kidnapping, torture, and surveillance of religious and local leaders are all attempts to contain any protests or demands for self-rule. The profits of mining are not channelled back into the province, where Papuans live in poverty in addition to dealing with Indonesian settlers from other islands.

In the national discourse, the province is seen as valuable to the country because of natural resources and biodiversity. However, Papuans who study and work in cities on the major island of Java face racial discrimination from both the general public and the police. In August this year, Papuan students in several cities protesting the 1962 agreement were accused of vandalising the Indonesian flag and were arrested, sparking protests in West Papua demanding justice for the students with banners saying ‘kami bukan monyet’ (we are not monkeys) and social media hashtags #papuabukanmonyet.

Demasking blackface

[…] all people are defined according to a set of terms that are constructed as mattering by those in positions of power or by those with investments in maintaining social hierarchies. To “see” “racial difference” is thus not to actually see differing bodies, but to see bodies as fundamentally marked by a particular way of viewing, with a particular emphasis on certain aspects of embodiment. (Riggs, 2008)

What does it take to demask the harms of blackface and brownface, when they are often hidden under the guise of humour? The first step is to make the connections between what seems like ageless cultural traditions and transnational flows of conceptualised representations. What seems to have always been there needs to be situated in a historical context. Excavating the past may also reveal more a history of progressive action and refusal of blackface and brownface.

Next is to understand that the performative use of blackface and brownface creates and reinforces racial hierarchies in a society. While in some contexts, brownface is used with reference to local dynamics while blackface to global dynamics, both build on each other and have a shared goal of dehumanisation, subordination and oppression in the service of larger economic ends. Finally, as culture is dynamic, it is always possible to create or bring back alternative performances that humanise historically marginalised peoples.

References

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2004. “From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (6): 931–50.

Cohen, Matthew Isaac. 2004. “Thousand and One Nights at the Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre and Travelling Stories in Colonial Southeast Asia .” Middle Eastern Literatures 7 (2): 235–46.

Fukushima, Yoshiko. 2011. “Ambivalent Mimicry in Enomoto Kenichi’s Wartime Comedy: His Revue and Blackface.” Comedy Studies 2 (1): 21–37.

Goppel, Daan. 2016. “Sie Gins Kom de Stoomboot - Sinterklaas Op De Molukken: Ambon.” YouTube. 2016.

Ho, Michelle H.S. 2017. “Consuming Women in Blackface: Racialized Affect and Transnational Femininity in Japanese Advertising.” Japanese Studies 37 (1): 49–69.

Kaur, Sharan. 2019. “Everything Old Is New Again: Singapore’s Long History with Blackface.” Coconuts Singapore. 2019. https://coconuts.co/singapore/features/everything-old-is-new-again-singapores-long-history-with-blackface/.

Kuipers, Matthijs. 2017. “‘Makanlah Nasi! (Eat Rice!)’: Colonial Cuisine and Popular Imperialism in The Netherlands During the Twentieth Century.” Global Food History 3 (1): 4–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/20549547.2017.1279515.

Reyes, Angelita D. 2019. “Performativity and Representation in Transnational Blackface: Mammy (USA), Zwarte Piet (Netherlands), and Haji Firuz (Iran).” Atlantic Studies : Global Currents 16 (4): 521–50.

Riggs, Damien. 2008. “How Do Bodies Matter? Understanding Embodied Racialised Subjectivities.” Darkmatter. 2008. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/23/how-do-bodies-matter-understanding-embodied-racialised-subjectivities/.

Veerasamy, Visakan. 2019. “It’s Time for a History of Singaporean Chinese People in Brownface.” Twitter. 2019. https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1156127173721251841.