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Abstract

Through an exploration of the Malay-language women’s weekly Soenting Melajoe (1912-1921), this article proposes “taman” (garden) as an alternative model of journalistic practice and community formation in colonial Indonesia. Countering historiographies that position professional journalism as the telos for media development in the modern world, we argue that Soenting Melajoe draws attention to a form of commoning that preceded and resisted colonial enclosure and Western journalistic frameworks. Through analysing reader contributions and editorial practices, we show how the publication’s writers conceptualized their work as cultivating a taman – a space open to collective participation yet bounded by shared values, care, and reciprocity. This taman challenges binary distinctions between commons and enclosure, revealing how boundary-making served communal purposes. By centring the affective labour of women editors and contributors who created journalism “otherwise”, this article contributes to decolonial media studies while offering reflections on contemporary journalism facing crises of representation and community trust.

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