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Situated Testimonies - Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive (Hardcover)
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Situated Testimonies - Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive (Hardcover)
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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
Dermout 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.
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