Nasya Bahfen, Febri Nurrahmi
To what extent does a local newspaper in the Indonesian province of Aceh construct Acehnese identity as distinct from Indonesian national identity? In this article, the authors examine the representation of Acehnese identity post-civil conflict and in relation to Indonesian national identity by drawing on a content analysis of Aceh’s local newspaper, Serambi Indonesia. There are few studies of representations of local ethnic groups in their local newspapers, let alone the representations of ethnic groups with a history of separatist movements. Therefore, this study sets out to bridge the gap in the literature on how a formerly separatist ethnic group is positioned vis-à-vis its nation-state in its local media. This study examines the representation of Acehnese in the local newspaper in terms of Anderson’s (1983) ‘imagined com-munity’, Billig’s (1995) ‘banal nationalism’, as well as ‘media representation and identity’. In doing so, this study attempts to give a more comprehensive approach to show that the local newspaper continues to be a means for the reproduction of ‘imagined communities’ and the delivery of the narrative of collective identity through the everyday representations of the nation. © 2018, Pacific Media Centre, Auckland University of Technology. All rights reserved.
Department of Communication and Media, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; Communication Department, Syiah Kuala University, Aceh, Indonesia
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