Of Self and Nation. Autobiography and the Representation of Modern Indonesia 12+

📗 "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, BerkeleyRecent 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 ...