Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Anthony Day, University of Sydney
Discussant: Hendrik M. J. Maier, Leiden University
Theories of postcolonial literature, in the sense of literature that engages with the legacy of the colonial language in postcolonial nation-states, appear at first sight inapplicable to the modern literature of Indonesia and Malay-language literature in Malaysia. In both these cases, an indigenous language, rather than the colonial language, became the source of a modern literary tradition.
The papers in this panel, however, argue that postcolonialism’s concern with issues of language, the nation-state, and the making of cultural identities offers a useful starting point for a reconsideration of the modern literatures of Indonesia and Malaysia. What is suggested, for example, about the possibility of achieving a "postcolonial" identity in Indonesia by the fact that "the ‘natives’ have created no coherent ‘Other’" (Goenawan Mohamad) in their modern literature? What are the implications for the status of Indonesian as a distinctly "national" language or the fact that Javanese and other regional languages, colonially subdued and nationally marginalised, are arguably more powerful languages of resistance to the hegemony of the state? How have female characters served as sites for struggle over the definition of "modernity" and "tradition"? What "possibilities of authentic, creative and plural development of social identities" (Partha Chatterjee) are explored in stories about interracial romance in the Netherlands Indies or in the novels of colonial and postcolonial Malaysia?
In addressing these issues in a comparative framework, the contributors to this panel seek to open up new possibilities for interpreting modern literature(s) and postcolonial identity in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Anthony Day and Keith Foulcher, University of Sydney
The aim of our paper is to examine the apparent absence in Indonesian literature of some of the key emphases of postcolonial theory. The first part of the paper looks at the declaration of a commitment to Bahasa Indonesia as a language of national unity (the famous Sumpah Pemuda of 1928) and its implications for Indonesian literary history. Drawing on an examination of the interaction of language and nationalist politics at this time, we suggest that it is at this moment that cultural nationalism moves beyond the known terrain already understood through the resonances of the languages of Indonesian ethnicities on the one hand, and the thought world of the colonial culture on the other. The kesoesastraan baroe embarks on a trajectory that sees it shadow the colonial culture, a nationalist but not nativist alternative to it, a unique and problematic version of postcolonial consciousness.
The second part of the paper examines the situation sixty years later when, in the early 1980s, the dominant discourse of "universal humanism" comes under attack from the advocates of sastra kontekstual, "contextual literature." This movement seeks to restore the connections between "literature," "society," and "history" which it sees as missing from the work of the universal humanists. Yet this post-1965 attempt to explore social issues and nativist sentiments also fails to engage fully with the issues of postcolonialism, for reasons which we want to examine by way of comparison with the literary production of the early 1930s.
Barbara Hatley, Monash University
Prewar Indonesian fiction reflects relatively clearly a phenomenon common to late colonial states, whereby European-influenced feminine behavior constitutes a shadowy, often threatening Other, a boundary-marker against which the new model of the modern Indonesian woman is defined. European characters may have disappeared, as Tickell suggests, from literary representations of pribumi Indonesian modernity, but their cultural traces remain. Among male writers, female characters serve as a site for presentation of particular conceptions of "modern woman" and appropriate gender relations. Women writers, meanwhile, depict female protagonists struggling to orient themselves within this field, to claim a modern, progressive space while resisting association with Western immodesty.
In post-independence Indonesian literature, nationalist sentiment as the basis of national culture produces an unquestioned discourse of cultural authenticity which leaves no space for hybridity or ambiguity. Representations of the feminine are both shaped by and constitutive of this process. In fiction of the 1970s and ‘80s, for example, nostalgic constructions of "traditional" womanhood flourish alongside state gender ideology valorising the essential nature and appropriate roles of Indonesian women. Women authors necessarily invoke the value of "authenticity," albeit differently defined.
What shifts are observable, however, in representations of the Indonesian national project, what gaps may open up, with the onslaught of late 1990s "globalization"? A recent novel both critiques rigid, exclusivist definitions of nation and celebrates hybridity and integration through the figure of a woman protagonist. To what extent, in what ways, does this work contribute to a wider literary and social discourse?
Virginia Hooker, The Australian National University
Literature in Malay is commonly presented as the nationalistic writings of school teachers and journalists who reflected the (backward) condition of the Malays and who performed a consciousness-raising exercise to energise the rakyat (little people) to improve their lot. This paper offers an alternative reading of extended Malay prose fiction which reveals the radical nature of the vision of many Malay writers. It begins with the question of why they chose Malay as their medium and its significance for the nature of their enterprise. The paper argues that writers of the colonial period, in a variety of ways, were creating a new space for their new Malays and at the same time were constructing sets of personal values which enabled them to be both modern and Malay.
After Independence many novels problematise the relationship between their characters and the State and describe a fierce need for Malay security to be expressed through possession of land. In contemporary Malaysia, in contrast to Indonesia, the national language is not the language of "idealised nationalism" (Anderson 1996), but is being sidetracked and overtaken by English which the current Malaysian Government promotes as the superhighway for its Hitech projects such as the MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor). This vision for Malaysia of the future to be led by a technologised elite is another "narrative of capital" (Partha Chatterjee) which offers no opportunities for dialogue with the ordinary Malay "narratives of community" and no opportunities for alternative visions of a Malay future.
Paul Tickell, Flinders University of South Australia
This paper centers on issues arising from the representation of interracial romance in early Indonesian fiction. Unlike later "mainstream" Indonesian fiction where issues of sexuality and representations of colonial "masters" (and "mistresses") disappear, there are many examples in earlier politically engaged as well as more "entertainment"-oriented literature where such issues are raised in ways that directly confront and partially subvert one of European colonialism’s primary discourses of control over the diverse populations of colonial societies, i.e., that of racial and sexual control and classification. The delineation, definition and difference produced by this discourse were to become an accepted "fact" in the literary representations of mainstream Indonesian literature from the late 1920s onwards. In this mainstream literature Europeans, Eurasians and Chinese all disappear, and with their disappearance also came the unquestioned assertion that to be modern and "Indonesian" was to be pribumi (an autochthon).
The major question that the paper will pose is how we read these examples of early bacaan liar. Do we see such literary representations as a conscious and delightfully insolent confrontation and rejection of colonial strategies of delineation and control? As an index of a truly multiracial moment in the political and literary history of the colonial Indies? Or do we read this material as flawed and incomplete—as an index of an only partially or imperfectly "modernized" consciousness?