"A brilliant reinterpretation of Indonesian history, providing a
wonderful access for historians and anthropologists to Indonesian
culture. Indeed, it gives them the literary tools which they sorely
lack and which, I fear, they don't always realize they lack. This
is a major milestone in the study of Southeast Asian
autobiography." --"Amin Sweeney, University of California,
Berkeley"
Recent scholarly work on nationalism has revealed the importance
of the nation imagined as a community. The subjects of these works,
however, have been largely political speeches, polemical essays,
and radical journalism. Missing has been the one literary genre
where the individual's commitment to the imagining of the nation is
most explicitly addressed: autobiography. In looking critically at
eight autobiographical works, all concerned in one way or another
with the question of what it means to be an Indonesian in the
twentieth century, C.W. Watson demonstrates the value of reading
autobiographies as accounts of nation-building.
Opening with a critique of a turn-of-the-century collection of
letters by an aristocratic Javanese now celebrated as the founder
of the women's movement in Indonesia, Watson goes on to consider
the autobiography of another Javanese who was co-opted into the
Dutch colonial service and whose reflections on his relationships
with senior Dutch officials lay bare the dynamics of the process of
twentieth-century colonialism. Other autobiographies by writers and
religious figures from Sumatra and Java who actively participated
in the struggle of the nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s
are also carefully scrutinized. The final chapter considers how
autobiographies written by a younger generation of Indonesians in
the late 1980s reconsider Indonesian nationalism in the light of a
commitment to a modernist Muslim perspective on the nation.
Watson's approach to the autobiographies highlights particular
sections in the texts where the writers hesitate or shift their
perspective within their narratives and consequently reveal more
than they perhaps intended. Close attention is paid to the declared
intention of each autobiography, how the writers set about
constructing a self-image of themselves by selecting one episode of
their lives over another and how they see their lives as being
bound up with that of the nation. In making use of this and other
methods drawn from literary criticism, history, and critical
ethnography, "Of Self and Nation" offers an original and
illuminating approach to understanding how a modern nation came
into existence and how its people have constructed a sense of
national identity.
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