Secondly, it is not a coincidence that the portrayal of Indonesian heroism in the colonial resistance movements is done in conjunction with national and religious (particularly Islamic) identity since there has been an overlap between national and Islamic identity in development of post-colonial discourse in Indonesia. First, this modern day stereotype should be seen in post-colonial discourse as the effort to situate Indonesian national identity in popular cognizance. The stereotyping of the Dutch in these films should be seen as a further strategy in a different context, in relation to two main reasons. This portrayal is always coupled with depiction of the films’ arch-protagonists as heroes who fight colonialism, and are equipped with religious justification and self-righteousness, which enable them to acquire superhuman strength. The portrayal is full of stereotype, in which the Dutch officials, as the colonial authority, are portrayed as “immoral” Westerners who are unjust and having insatiable appetite towards financial accumulation. This paper intends to examine the portrayal of the Dutch colonialism in Indonesian b-movies, which mostly occupied Indonesian screens in 1970s to 1980s. As such, fans are often ‘othered’ within such articles, a process mirroring the ways they are accused of othering distant cultural artefacts. Further, I argue that the constant critique of fans as avoiding contextualization has not only been overstated but stringently used as a yardstick to denigrate fan engagements with texts as improper. In fact, I argue that a number of such exotic-oriented critiques of transnational cultism are actually guilty of practising what they preach against: an insufficient contextualization of fandom and a tendency to downplay the messiness of empirical data in favour of generalized abstractions. In this article, I critique a number of such articles for merely assuming such processes without proffering sufficient supporting evidence. Much attention has been paid to how Western fans are problematically drawn to artefacts outside of their own cultures because of exotic qualities, resulting in a shallow and often condescending appreciation of such films. Academic scholarship addressing transnational cult fandom, particularly Western cult fans forming attachments to films outside their cultures, has frequently addressed the issue of exoticism.
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