| Description |
1 online resource (xxi, 349 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Note on Spelling and Translations ; Preface ; Acknowledgments ; Introduction: Histories, Mythologies, and Javanese Tales ; Chapter 1. Hearing Islamic Voices in ""Hindu-Javanese"" Tales ; Chapter 2. Colonial Discourse and Javanese Shadow Theatre ; Chapter 3. Failed Narratives of the Nation or the New ""Essence"" of Java? ; Chapter 4. Javanese Storytellers, Colonial Categories, Mahabharata Tales ; Chapter 5. Revolutionary Rhetoric and Postcolonial Performance Domains ; Chapter 6. Fictions, Images, and Allegories ; Selected Glossary ; Selected Bibliography ; Index |
| Summary |
Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia. Though Javanese shadow theater (wayang) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re-envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought--and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture. Shadows of Empire will appeal not only to specialists in Javanese culture and historians of Indonesia, but also to a wide range of scholars in the areas of performance and literature, anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, and postcolonial studies |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-334) and index |
| Notes |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
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digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL |
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Print version record |
| Subject |
Wayang.
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Wayang plays -- History and criticism
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Tales -- Indonesia -- Java -- History and criticism
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PERFORMING ARTS -- Reference.
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SOCIAL SCIENCE -- General.
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Tales
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Wayang
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Wayang plays
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Schattenspiel
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Wajang.
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Kolonialisme.
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Contes indonésiens -- Histoire et critique.
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Théâtre indonésien -- Histoire et critique.
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Wayang.
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| SUBJECT |
Java (Indonesia) -- History. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh93001372
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| Subject |
Indonesia -- Java
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Java
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Java (Indonésie) -- Histoire.
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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History
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| ISBN |
9780822398042 |
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0822398044 |
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