See also Heeren, Katinka Van, “ Return of the Kyai: Representations of Horror, Commerce, and Censorship in Post-Suharto Indonesian Film and Television,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8, 2 ( 2007): 211–26 CrossRef Google Scholar. The quest for transparency in the domain of politics and the fascination with supernatural apparitions in popular media share an “aesthetic of appearance,” based on “anticipation for the moment of (potential) revelation or recognition.” Steedly, Mary Margaret, “ Transparency and Apparition: Media Ghosts of Post-New Order Indonesia,” in Spyer, Patricia and Steedly, Mary Margaret, eds., Images that Move ( Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2013), 257–94 Google Scholar, here 261. Nevertheless, the post-Suharto period has seen the florescence of media trafficking in occult phenomena.

Broadly, the essay argues that national political orders and their public spheres cannot be understood apart from a history of visual mediation.Ģ0 Strassler, Karen, “ Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese-Indonesian Rape Debates in Post-Suharto Indonesia,” Gender and History 16, 4, ( 2004): 689– 725 CrossRef Google Scholar. I offer an ethnographic examination of images of Ratu Kidul across a range of media, attending to their material qualities as mediums by which the spirit queen appears and circulates. Yet popular reception of images of Ratu Kidul as auratic conduits of her spiritual power reveal the continued presence of a visuality within Indonesian national modernity that runs counter to dominant logics of transparency. I argue that becoming accessible via the image was necessary to her continued political agency within a mass-mediated national public sphere in which visibility and circulation are preconditions of political recognition.

In this paper, I trace the history of her mediation as image via paint, photography, television, film, and the Internet in order to ask how this queen of the unseen world came to be so visible a feature of the postcolonial landscape and to interrogate the nature and effects of this visibility. Ratu Kidul is a legendary spirit queen who plays a significant role in Javanese political ontologies and has come to be an icon of Indonesian public culture.

Ajian Ratu Laut Kidul