Doreen Lee, Cornell PhD '07, was awarded the Harry J. Benda Prize for her book Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia. The award, which honors one of the pioneers in the field of Southeast Asian studies, is given annually by the Association for Asian Studies to an outstanding newer scholar from any discipline or country specialization of Southeast Asian studies for a first book in the field. Lee is associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Sociology and at Northeastern University.
In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists' experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present.
The prize will be presented at the AAS annual conference March 21-24 in Denver, Colorado.
Congratulations, Doreen!
