Abstrack:
This article deals with self-narratives, postcoloniality, and negotiation of neoliberalism as ideology in Indonesian films in the 2000s, particularly in some teen and children films. In this era, filmic self-narratives become more individual in which filmic characters get freedom in expressing desires, individual-skillful struggles, and self-identities. Such narratives represent a detaching and deconstructing process from local and national bounds, as represented in filmic narratives under the New Order regime. By exploring cultural ambivalences as the dominant condition of postcoloniality, the films still articulate some traditional/local values in filmic world structure, but rather than empower their roles, their appearances tend to support self-narratives of teenagers and children who want to get more freedom in modern life. From cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and political economy perspective, self-narratives of teenagers and children that seek freedom from traditional bounds, for celebrating individualism, and for creating skillful self as the ways to reach great achievements, represent discursive negotiation of neoliberalism as ideal orientation for postcolonial Indonesian. Those narratives do not explore neoliberalism as a free market system transparently, but as individuals-capacity ideology that will make them successful in social, economy, and cultural competitiveness.
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