Tempo Doeloe nostalgia and Brani memory community: the IWI collection as a postcolonial archive

The focus of this chapter is on the framing, the reframing, and the social biography of the IWI (Indisch Wetenschappelijk Instituut) photographs. This is a postcolonial collection of family snapshots and professional photographs taken in colonial Indonesia and, after 1945, brought to the Netherlands. From the 1950s the photographs were shared, disseminated, and brought together in a collection by Indo-Dutch immigrants, and were donated to the Amsterdam Tropenmuseum after being digitized in 2008. This chapter shows that the IWI family photographs can be perceived as "active players" in the emergence of both a national nostalgia (tempo doeloe) and a brani (daring) memory community in which the Indo-Dutch have engaged to make sense of their lives. Framed by the Tropenmuseum's "regular" photographic collections, the IWI photographs have also come to balance and challenge the more official and institutionalized photographs of the Dutch colonial project in the Netherlands East Indies.