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Shadow Plays with Imperial Pasts: Writing Wayang in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Fugitive
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 64, Number 3, Fall 2018
- pp. 403-430
- 10.1353/mfs.2018.0036
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This essay investigates the implications of employing an inter-imperial heuristic within a longue durée timeframe for the study of postindependence Indonesian literature. It traces the history of shadow puppet theatre as a production of and vehicle for the politics of consecutive and contemporaneous empires in the Indonesian archipelago since the first millennium. Through a reading of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Fugitive (1950), this essay argues that the transmediation from theatre to text of this centuriesold performative tradition afforded post-1945 authors a symbolic solution for managing the legacies of their nation’s imperialistic encounters in their pursuit of an emancipatory cultural project.