Arts Collected Works - Theses
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ItemPerforming Emiria Sunassa : reframing the female subject in post(University of Melbourne, 2012)The central figure of this thesis is Emiria Sunassa, a woman who was born in 1894 in Tanah Wangko, North Sulawesi. She grew up in colonial Indonesia, and later during the 1940s, amidst the transition from colonial to Independent Indonesia, she became the new nation�s most prominent female painter. Sources show that Emiria lived an extraordinary life as a nurse, plantation administrator, tiger and elephant hunter, businesswoman, poison-maker, and as a princess from the island Sultanate of Tidore who fought for Papuan independence from the Dutch. During the early 1960s Emiria �disappeared� from Jakarta, which later meant that those who remembered her often regarded Emiria as a �mystery�, and over the decades that followed she gradually disappeared from Indonesian public memory. The recent excavation of Emiria in the late 1990s and 2000s prompts the question of how does one embark on the task of reconstructing the subject of Emiria amidst so many conflicting narratives, artifacts and imaginings, and partial and fragmentary memories? This thesis examines Emiria�s creative practice, political commitments and everyday life as located at the centre of the discursive and practical project of the formation of a modern Indonesian culture during late colonial Indonesia. It introduces a framework for reconceptualising Emiria�s subjectivity through the performative tropes of princess/ primitive; home/ mother; and body/ self to enable an articulation of the feminine which has been negated or co-opted through singular or totalising narratives of the nation and colonialism. Emiria�s performance of these tropes is central as a historicising vehicle for the thesis and as a way for rewriting Emiria�s slippery, multiple and fragmented subjectivity. The thesis shows how Emiria transformed this apparent fragmentation as a strategy to continually reinvent herself, thus eluding subjugation and enclosure within categories fixed through nationalist and colonial power structures. I show how Emiria�s performances of the feminine can thus be reconfigured as potential sites for rupture and contestation.