Massada's Astaganaga

This book explores an album of popular music with remarkable significance to a violent wave of postcolonial tensions in the Netherlands in the 1970s. Several 'actions' were claimed by a small number of first-generation descendants of more than 12,000 reluctant migrants from Indonesia (former Dutch East Indies). Transferred in 1951, their sojourn should have been temporary, but frustratingly turned out to be permanent. At the height of strained relations, Massada rose to the occasion. Astaganaga (1978) is a telling example of the will to negotiate a different diasporic Moluccan identity through uplifting contemporary sounds.