Title Situated testimonies : dread and enchantment in an Indonesian literary archive / Laurie J. Sears

Published Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2013

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Description 1 online resource (xxv, 318 pages) : illustrations, map, portraits Series UPCC book collections on Project MUSE Contents Introduction: the afterwardsness of history -- Desire, phantoms, and commodities: Maria Dermoût's colonial critique -- At home and not at home in empire: transnational phantasies of colonial modernity -- A neurotic family romance of modernity and the national form -- The end of the nationalist romance -- Trauma and its doubles in postcolonial masculinity -- Masculinist trauma and feminist melancholia -- Afterword: trauma, translation, and a critical path Summary The Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer made a distinction between a "downstream" literary reality and an "upstream" historical reality. Pramoedya suggested that literature has an effect on the upstream flow of history and that it can in fact change history. In Situated Testimonies Laurie Sears illuminates this process by considering a selection of Dutch Indies and Indonesian literary works that span the twentieth century and beyond and by showing how authors like Louis Couperus and Maria Dermoût help retell and remodel history. Sears sees certain literary works as "situated testimonies," bringing ineffable experiences of trauma into narrative form and preserving something of the dread and enchantment that animated the past. These literary works offer a method of reading the emotional traces that historians may fail to witness or record--traces that elude archival constructions where political factors or colonial conditions have influenced processes of what is preserved and how it is shaped. Sears' use of Donna Haraway's notion of "situatedness" reiterates the idea that all of us speak from somewhere. Testimony, especially eyewitness testimony, is a gold standard in historical methodology, and the authors of literary works are eyewitnesses of their time. But the works of authors like Tirto Adhi Soerjo and Soewarsih Djojopoespito are first of all written as literature, and literary or stylistic devices cannot be ignored. Sears finds substantial evidence of the movement of psychoanalytic theories between Europe and the Indies/Indonesia throughout the twentieth century. She concludes that far from being only a Jewish or European discourse, psychoanalysis is a transnational discourse of desire that has influenced Indies and Indonesian writers for more than a century. Psychoanalytic ideas, and the suggestion by French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche and Indonesian author Ayu Utami that memories, like literature, can move us back and forth in time, have inspired Sears' thinking about historical archives, literature, and trauma. Soekarno's words haunt this book as he haunts Indonesia's past. Situated Testimonies rewrites portions of the literary and social history of Indonesia over a sweep of many decades. Historians, scholars of literary theory, and Indonesianists will all be interested in the book's insights on how colonial and postcolonial novels of the Indies and Indonesia illuminate nationalist narratives and imperial histories Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-303) and index Notes In English 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 digitized 2011 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Subject Indonesian literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism Indonesian literature (Dutch) -- History and criticism Literature and history -- Indonesia Psychic trauma in literature. Psychoanalysis and literature -- Indonesia LITERARY CRITICISM -- Australian & Oceanian. LITERARY CRITICISM -- Asian -- General. Indonesian literature Indonesian literature (Dutch) Literature and history Psychic trauma in literature Psychoanalysis and literature Kollektives Gedächtnis Literatur Nationalismus Motiv Indonesia Indonesien Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2012040244 ISBN 9780824839116 0824839110 0824836839 9780824836832 9780824871031 0824871030

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