Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia (book talk)

Communication against Capital (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores the revolutionary communication strategies of the pergerakan merah, the anticolonial "red movement" in 1920s Indonesia.

Rianne Subijanto tells the story of ordinary lower-class women and children and people of diverse ethnicities who waged their battles against Dutch colonialism within multiple arenas of communication, including political associations, assemblies, printed matter, schools, and shipping lines. Existing communication technologies were repurposed into mechanisms of struggle and used as weapons in anticolonial and anticapitalist resistance. In this process, communist ideas merged with ideals drawn from the Enlightenment to shape the emancipatory spirit of Indonesians.

This red enlightenment motivated the production of revolutionary communication strategies of mobilization. Subijanto's innovative work shows that the novel techniques of the pergerakan merah served to shift anticolonial mobilization in Indonesia from warfare to modern forms of communication.

Speaker & chair biographies

Dr. Rianne Subijanto is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. She serves on the executive committee of the New York Southeast Asia Network (NYSEAN) and is an editor at indoprogress.com.

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

*Banner photo by Santhosh Mocharla on Unsplash

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