East Timor – birth of a nation

This imovie by one of the students in my Nationalism class, Eki Ramadhan, documents the rise of a new national consciousness in East Timor after its occupation by Indonesia following the departure of the Portugese in 1974. Eki shows that it was Indonesia’s own policies to develop and assimilate the province (promoting literacy, teaching Bahasa Indonesia as a common language, encouraging the spread of Catholicism, selecting cultural features to represent a common East Timor identity) that ironically helped to forge a unified sense of identity as East Timorese.

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