Aria Danaparamita (Mita): On borders, State-building, and Liberatory Possibilities

Editor's note: On 21 February 2026, Mita gave a talk at the Political Dumplings - Talks & Collective Cooking with Bordered Lives. The following is the transcript and proofread by them.

First of all, I want to introduce myself. I'm a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer from Indonesia. I work in human rights and migrant justice, but I’m also involved in community organising around labour, migration and land justice. I also have a research interest in visual and material historiography. To me, that means the use of visual and material culture to create narratives. I was particularly researching narratives of nation-building and empire-building in the context of early 19th to early 20th century British occupation of Java, Malaya, and Burma. My artistic and political practice is informed by this critical engagement with colonial and nation-state projects and the impact on people and land.

Today I want to talk through some ways I find food to be political. And I'm going to start with the rendang battle. Basically, Indonesia and Malaysia have been in this ongoing war about whether rendang is considered Indonesian or Malaysian. The Indonesian government has been trying to get it recognised officially as a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. But of course, rendang itself just exists - it doesn’t hold a passport. Rendang is a dish that comes from the Minang ethnic group. I would say their home base is where the province of West Sumatra in Indonesia is now. But just like many people, they have quite a porous existence. You have Minang people living in other parts of northwestern Sumatra and in what is now Malaysia. There is a lot of movement and migration with people settling in different areas: there is an estimated 1 million ethnic Minang living in Malaysia. This illustrates how food and people move, and we don't always necessarily recognise formal nation-state borders.

Mita at the Political Dumplings - Talks & Collective Cooking with Bordered Lives. Photography by Momo Ye Mu.

Indeed, as the saying goes: we didn't cross borders; borders came to us. And that is very much true when you are talking about communities that live in these transliminal border spaces. The border came to them when Indonesia proclaimed independence in 1945, which was internationally recognised in 1949, and was drawn essentially as a direct result of its colonial history. The big difference between modern-day Indonesia and Malaysia is that Indonesia was for the most part colonised by the Dutch, whereas Malaysia was colonised by the British. And that's how our understanding of our national identity today was created.  

Food is also political in that sense. I'm going to talk about two different case studies here, both in Indonesia because that's my area of familiarity. The first is rice and the politics of erasure. When you think about “Indonesian food” now, you might think it is quite rice-based – some noodles, but a lot of rice. We eat rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We sometimes eat other things with the rice, but it's very rice-heavy. It's also why we're all diabetic. And the reason we eat a lot of rice is what the Dutch introduced: monoculture plantations. With colonialism came the capitalist logic of maximising profit with the least amount of labour, land, and resources. So then we got rice, tea, coffee, palm oil plantations. All of these plantation cultures have continued today in Indonesia, which is quite problematic. What happened was the displacement of indigenous populations across the archipelago, as well as the food cultures that they traditionally had. 

Another thing the Dutch introduced was a policy called “transmigration”. This is basically when the Dutch, in order to create the labour force to maintain these plantations, sent off primarily ethnic Javanese people to other islands. This is essentially the colonisation of the rest of Indonesia by Javanese people. As a result of this policy of transmigration, which the Indonesian state government continued after independence, you have this sort of Javanese supremacist culture being transported and imposed onto the other islands across Indonesia, at the cost of local indigenous food practices and growing practices. We had so much more diversity than we have now that we lost as a result of colonisation and continued neo-colonisation. 

Food is tied to land custodianship and land management. The food we eat is what we grow, and what we grow is what we have land to cultivate. Nowadays, there are initiatives cropping up to revive food sovereignty, for example, the Lakoat Kujawas project in East Nusa Tenggara, which is trying to revive local indigenous subsistence cultivation and cuisine. So that's one example of how food can become political, when we see the way that food is used as a tool of colonialism, resulting in the erasure of indigenous practice. 

Collective Indonesian-style siomay making at the Political Dumplings. Photography by Momo Ye Mu.

The second case study I want to talk about is when food can be a lens through which we understand appropriation. And that's why I picked today's dumpling recipe, “siomay”, which is the Indonesian version of 烧卖 / 燒賣. It's a derivative, of course, of the Chinese dumpling dish. What makes it Indonesian is that we eat it with peanut sauce. And there's a long, very complicated, very violent history when it comes to Chinese migration to Indonesia and how ethnic Chinese people have been treated by various governments in Indonesia. Prior to modern nation-states and western colonisation, with borders much more porous than they are now, there were lots of trade and exchange happening across East and Southeast Asia. There have always been Chinese people, and people of Chinese heritage, living in what is now Indonesia. And unfortunately, along with that has also been a lot of anti-Chinese racism. I'm going to focus just on modern history and name a few key flashpoints. In 1740, under the Dutch, there was the anti-Chinese massacre, known in Indonesian as “Geger Pecinan.” It’s a complicated history, but essentially, there was resistance among the ethnic Chinese communities to Dutch exploitation, and the Dutch retaliated in a very violent way. That was a moment that became a wound and trauma in Indonesian history, particularly within the Chinese community. 

Then, in the 1960s, there was a Western-backed anti-communist purge across Southeast Asia. The USA and its allies tried to portray communism as a product of the Soviet Union and China. And so, anyone who is perceived to be linked to that, for example, by your cultural or ethnic heritage, is portrayed as a communist. At the time in Indonesia, there were militias that would go out and murder people they thought were communist, regardless of whether they were politically affiliated or active at all.

And then we have 1998. This is now decades into Indonesia’s independence. It was again a very tumultuous time in Indonesian history. The dictator Soeharto, who took power after the anti-communist purges, had now been in power for more than 30 years, and people were finally getting enough. It was also the time of the financial crisis, and so there was a lot of unrest. In May, it took on a racist element. With the pressures of the financial crisis on top of the political pressures, the Chinese community became scapegoated. So, you had in Jakarta and other parts of Indonesia mass lootings and shops being burned down and rapes of ethnically Chinese women. And like the 1965-66 massacres, none of this has been brought to justice. 

The presence of people of Chinese heritage in Indonesia - and everything that they bring with them: their entire cultural heritage, the food, the traditions - has always been intertwined with a lot of violence and trauma. This is that very classic thing that I'm sure all of us who come from colonised countries can relate to, where they appreciate your food, your culture, your music, but not the people or their rights. That's especially relevant in the UK now. For example, we think of the recent time when far-right fascists descended on London, and you see them draped in their England flags and then going out for a kebab, and you're like, how is this making sense? But actually, it makes a lot of sense, because it's that idea of cultural appropriation, where your relationship to a culture or people is entirely extractive, such that you would extract what you would find valuable or pleasant or aesthetic to you, while ignoring the actual people. 

The Indonesian-style siomay after the collective-making. Photography by Momo Ye Mu.

That's a lot of really depressing stuff. So I’ll try to end on a more positive, more liberatory note. Once we recognise the power of food as a political tool, we can also use that power. One example I want to share is the “Milk Tea Alliance”. For those of you who are not familiar, it's an online movement that arose in the late 2010s and early 2020s, emerging from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Myanmar, and spreading to parts of India as well. It's one of these online leaderless movements that grew quite organically, coming out of the 2019 pro-democracy protests we were seeing in Hong Kong. A few months later, in 2020, apparently - I did have to Google this because I didn't actually know how the movement started - but apparently it started when a Thai celebrity posted something with the Hong Kong flag, which was seen as a pro-Hong Kong statement that then came under fire from pro-PRC trolls online. So it was this movement that started out initially as a response to the PRC but which then expanded into a much broader pro-democracy, anti-authoritarian movement. And it was called the “Milk Tea Alliance” because the idea was that it was an expression of solidarity from people whose traditions included drinking tea with milk, in opposition to the PRC, where people wouldn’t drink their tea with milk. 

Now there is a lot of reflection that we could gain from that movement. For example, you could debate about whether it was really a movement or mainly online chatter. But also whether that was the right framing and whether it was ultimately liberatory. My own criticism of it is that, because of the way that the movement came about, a lot of the framing was very much nation-state-based, whether Hong Kong versus China, or Taiwan versus China. That is understandable because in the context of pro-independence movements, there's a reason why people use a lot of flag imagery and symbolism. But equally, it risks oversimplifying what is really happening. We might see a particular state as the enemy - in that case, the PRC - as opposed to deeply analysing what was happening socially, politically, and economically in each of these localities, but also what was shared transnationally that enabled the rise of authoritarianism in multiple countries at once. We're talking about transnational political interests and flows of capital.

I don't really have a conclusion to this, other than that food is political and complicated. And that our relationship to these cultural markers can be revealing of our own political histories, identities and future trajectories. ■

The Political Dumplings - Talks & Collective Cooking with Bordered Live is organised by Nicole Zhang and Qianrui Hu at The Advocacy Academy's The Liberation Centre, 21 February 2026, with support from Edge Fund and The Advocacy Academy. Graphic by Ning Jiang.