Here is an open door into one of the most complex societies in the world today. These colorful stories, each uniquely different in style and subject matter, take issue with worn stereotypes and reflect both everyday life and the great upheavals that have marked modern Indonesian national life: the end of Dutch and then Japanese colonial rule, the bloody collapse of Sukarno's Old Order, subsequent consolidation of a regime commited to development, and coming soon a major and unpredictable leadership transition as Soeharto's thirty-year rule winds down. With a population approaching 200 million speaking 583 languages spread across 13,600 islands on 3 million square miles of ocean and with one of the world's largest economies, growing fast in the midst of persistent poverty, Indonesia demands our attention and understanding. Yet information about it is woefully scarce.

Anyone interested in Indonesia and its literature will find "Nusantara" (Homeland), expertly translated and introduced, an excellent place to begin.

Here is an open door into one of the most complex societies in the world today. These colorful stories, each uniquely different in style and subject matter, take issue with worn stereotypes and reflect both everyday life and the great upheavals that have marked modern Indonesian national life: the end of Dutch and then Japanese colonial rule, the bloody collapse of Sukarno's Old Order, subsequent consolidation of a regime commited to development, and coming soon a major and unpredictable leadership transition as Soeharto's thirty-year rule winds down. With a population approaching 200 million speaking 583 languages spread across 13,600 islands on 3 million square miles of ocean and with one of the world's largest economies, growing fast in the midst of persistent poverty, Indonesia demands our attention and understanding. Yet information about it is woefully scarce.

Anyone interested in Indonesia and its literature will find "Nusantara" (Homeland), expertly translated and introduced, an excellent place to begin.

How does the language of poetry conspire with the language of power? This question is at the heart of this volume which deals with Indonesia and the Philippines in the early modern and post-1945 periods. These two nations have been shaped by the forces of nationalism, revolution, and metropolitan hegemony. Whether written in Malay, Tagalog, English, or Dutch the writings coming from them carry the contradictions of their time and place in the milieu of race and class. The contributors examine the literature and politics of Indonesia and Philippines from the point of view of contemporary thinking. Their examinations include the responses of indigenous writers to censorship and to their marginalization and cooption by colonial and neocolonial states. They investigate the rhetoric of spectacle in the Philippines of Ferdinand Marcos, the function of pasyon in Tagalog religious narrative, the writings of Pramoedya Ananta Toer in Indonesia, and the memoirs of a Javanese aristocrat. This book will be of interest to colonial historians and to students and scholars of non-Western and comparative literature.