| Summary: | Since the end of Suharto's rule in 1998, Indonesia's official history has been
contested, especially by former political prisoners from the 1965 period, who had
previously been regarded as the regime's enemies. In challenging the New Order
regime's historical accounts, these former prisoners have written, and in some
instances published, their memoirs, as well as taken part in oral history projects.
This paper examines the genre of 'prisoner memoirs' and oral history work,
which have flourished in the post-Suharto period. It surveys some of the common
themes and motivations among such works and draws upon interviews with expolitical prisoners engaged in both memoir-writing and oral history projects. The
paper also charts how such a genre and method can assist with documenting
more of Indonesia's post-independence period from a diverse range of sources.
Writing on Indonesia's post-independence history has posed many difficulties due
to the New Order regime's representation of the Sukarno period as constituting a
'political mistake'. The end of the Cold War, however, has generated more interest
among scholars in how Southeast Asian leftist movements and organisations dealt
with questions of ideology and mobilisation in the nation-building phase of the
1950s and 1960s.
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