Remembering the Silenced: Social Justice, Democracy, and the Humanities

Last week, I returned from a trip to Indonesia, where I attended the annual meeting of the Society of Asian Biblical Studies (SABS) in Jakarta. As an Indonesian immigrant, I find that each return visit evokes different memories. During lunch with friends, we discussed the story behind the creation of the Buru Quartet, a series of novels by the Indonesian literary giant Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Toer was imprisoned on Buru Island during Suharto’s authoritarian rule and the violent anti-communist campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. These campaigns targeted members and alleged supporters of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI, Partai Komunis Indonesia). Buru Island lies in the province where I was born and raised, giving Pram’s story particular personal significance for me. Under these brutal conditions, he conceived the Buru Quartet, his literary masterpiece. Initially denied access to writing materials, he recounted the novels orally to his fellow prisoners.

Pram’s story reminds me of how far an authoritarian regime can suppress human freedom and creative thought. During Suharto’s rule, Indonesian students, including me, were required each year to watch a government-produced film that presented the regime’s official interpretation of the horrific events of 1965.

The film Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI) dramatized the abduction and murder of six army generals and one military officer in 1965. It portrayed the Indonesian Communist Party as the sole architect of the violence and depicted its members and affiliated organizations as cruel and inhuman. The narrative culminated with Suharto and the military restoring order, while omitting the subsequent killing and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists and other civilians. By dividing the nation into heroic defenders and treacherous enemies, the film transformed a complex and contested history into a powerful justification for the New Order regime. No competing narrative was permitted; interpretations that challenged the official account were immediately suppressed.

Returning to Indonesia reminded me that democracy can flourish only when everyone is free to speak and be heard. Every form of repression, whether subtle or overt, must be recognized, analyzed, and resisted. Democracy requires more than elections and political institutions. It also depends on our willingness to protect human dignity, confront distorted narratives, and create space for those who have been silenced.

Before my trip to Indonesia, I read the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, written by a group of scholars commissioned by Chancellors Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt University and Andrew D. Martin of the University of Washington. I was particularly struck by its concern that contemporary scholarship is increasingly “subordinate to, or in the service of, political (social or moral) goals beyond the advancement of knowledge and understanding.” The authors broadly characterize this tendency as “turning the humanities into vehicles for social justice” and associate it with projects such as antiracism, feminism, decolonization, and equity for gender and sexual minorities (12).

As I traveled through Indonesia, the document and the assumptions underlying its argument continued to trouble and haunt me. Indonesia’s history has convinced me that excluding social justice does not protect intellectual freedom. Rather, it risks weakening the very practices of criticism, historical recovery, and democratic debate that the humanities are meant to sustain. The following are several reflections on this argument, informed by my experience as an Indonesian.

First, Indonesia’s history shows that democracy cannot flourish without a commitment to social justice, especially justice for victims of political violence and repression. The Suharto regime’s authoritarian practices eventually drew strong resistance from the Indonesian people. Amid mass protests and a profound economic crisis, Suharto fell from power in 1998, marking the start of the period known as Reformasi. This history teaches us that social justice is more than a safeguard against authoritarianism; it is a fundamental condition for democracy to function.

Second, the position that the humanities should be separated from social justice work strikes me as deeply ironic. How can we study the humanities without confronting the conditions that keep people—especially members of marginalized communities—unheard? If the humanities help us interpret human experience, examine the exercise of power, and recover neglected histories, social justice cannot be entirely separated from humanistic inquiry. At their best, the humanities teach us not only to understand the world but also to recognize and challenge the forces that deny people their dignity and freedom. I fear that removing social justice from the humanities could encourage uncritical acceptance of a single narrative, particularly one produced and controlled by those in power. My experience under the Suharto regime demonstrates the danger of allowing an official account to stand unchallenged. When the humanities cease to question dominant narratives, recover silenced histories, or examine whose interests those narratives serve, they risk becoming instruments of power rather than means of critical inquiry. A commitment to social justice helps ensure that the humanities remain open to multiple perspectives, especially the voices of those whom official histories have excluded.

Third, the report’s authors seem to believe that separating the humanities from social justice will rescue humanistic inquiry from political agendas. This position, however, rests on the mistaken assumption that the humanities can ever be free from politics. Decisions about which texts to study, whose histories to preserve, and which voices to regard as authoritative are never entirely neutral. Excluding social justice does not depoliticize the humanities. Instead, it can leave prevailing structures of power unexamined and make their political assumptions seem natural or universal.

These convictions should also guide theological inquiry, a field within the broader humanities. Theology cannot remain detached from the realities of political repression, historical violence, and human suffering. If theology speaks of human dignity and the justice of God, it must also attend to those whose dignity has been violated and whose voices have been silenced. Theology, democracy, and the humanities therefore share a responsibility: to preserve memory, resist oppression, and help create a society where every person can speak, participate, and flourish.