Laurie J. Sears's Books

Situated Testimonies

Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

By: Laurie J. Sears

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Situated Testimonies

Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive

By: Laurie J. Sears

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.

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Page Count

354

Publisher

University of Hawaii Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0824839110

ISBN 13

9780824839116

The Encoded Cirebon Mask

Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java's Islamic Northwest Coast

By: Laurie Margot Ross

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The Encoded Cirebon Mask

Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java's Islamic Northwest Coast

By: Laurie Margot Ross

In The Encoded Cirebon Mask: Materiality, Flow, and Meaning along Java’s Islamic Northwest Coast, Laurie Margot Ross situates masks and masked dancing in the Cirebon region of Java (Indonesia) as an original expression of Islam. This is a different view from that of many scholars, who argue that canonical prohibitions on fashioning idols and imagery prove that masks are mere relics of indigenous beliefs that Muslim travelers could not eradicate. Making use of archives, oral histories, and the performing objects themselves, Ross traces the mask’s trajectory from a popular entertainment in Cirebon—once a portal of global exchange—to a stimulus for establishing a deeper connection to God in late colonial Java, and eventual links to nationalism in post-independence Indonesia.

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Page Count

392

Publisher

BRILL

Published Date

ISBN 10

9004315217

ISBN 13

9789004315211

Panoramas, 1787–1900 Vol 5

Texts and Contexts

By: Laurie Garrison,Anne Anderson,Sibylle Erle,Verity Hunt,Peter West,Phoebe Putnam

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Panoramas, 1787–1900 Vol 5

Texts and Contexts

By: Laurie Garrison,Anne Anderson,Sibylle Erle,Verity Hunt,Peter West,Phoebe Putnam

The panorama is primarily a visual medium, but a variety of print matter mediated its viewing; adverts, reviews, handbills and a descriptive programme accompanied by an annotated key to the canvas. The short accounts, programs, reviews, articles and lectures collected here are the primary historical sources left to us.

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Page Count

513

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

1040128971

ISBN 13

9781040128978

Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia

By: Laurie Jo Sears

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Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia

By: Laurie Jo Sears

Presenting dialogues between prominent scholars of and from Indonesia and Indonesian women working in professional, activist, religious, and literary domains, the book dissolves essentialist notions of "women" and "Indonesia" that have arisen out of the tensions of empire.

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Page Count

372

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

082231696X

ISBN 13

9780822316961

Shadows of Empire

Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales

By: Laurie Jo Sears

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Shadows of Empire

Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales

By: Laurie Jo Sears

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.

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