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E-book Trajectories of Memory : Excavating the Past in Indonesia

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Penilaian

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n this dense passage, the narrator begins by recalling his deceased father’s words about justice and personal freedom. Yet for him, the very effort required to voice his father’s advice marks the transience of sensory per-ception and the beginning of memory: it ends in apprehension about the precarity of memory in the passage of time.The story traces the interplay of sense, memory, and inscription as the narrator grows from a young child to an adult in a time of turbulent transi-tion—the jaman edan, a time of madness or chaos in the traditional Javanese concept of time2—for him personally as for the nation. The child is overwhelmed by the experiences his senses offer up, and dependent upon his parents and an aging nurse to make socially and culturally accept-able sense of them. The young adult he becomes begins to write down these memories, but paradoxically, the act of writing opens up disjunctions between the explanations his elders offered to keep him quiet and what his own, mature, acts of recall reveal. The parallels Pramoedya suggests between the child and the emergent nation are clear. Remembering the child awed by the “greatness of the people in olden days” in the stories he is told, the narrator attempts to break the seductive power (pesona) of the old stories and declares: “Looking back now, I see that I was like many people, both now and then, who would rather think about the past than deal with the present” (p. 6).The gap between sensory perception and the vulnerability of memory, not only in the course of time but also in the hands of power, has been a tenacious topic in Indonesian studies. In the aftermath of the downfall of the authoritarian New Order, the predominant discourse on memory has focused on bringing to voice those silenced in the 1965–1968 purges, thereby addressing what were recognized as distortions in the narratives of that recent past (Zurbuchen, 2005; Heryanto, 2005; Setiawan, 2006; Roosa, 2006; Adam, 2015). The turbulent Reformasi of 1998 (Budiman et al., 1999; Sukanta, 1999; Lee, 2016; Pramesti, 2018) also gave rise to more critical scholarship on other historical moments involving conflict and violence, such as the Dutch colonial period (Bijl, 2015; Baay, 2015; Limpach, 2016) and the Japanese Occupation (Janssen, 2010; Mariana, 2015). There has been scholarship on groups affected by these traumatic historical junctures including the Chinese Indonesians (Dawis, 2009) and the Acehnese (Grayman et al., 2009; Good et al., 2010) to name but two. There have also been works on mnemonic instruments and memorializa-tion (Kusno, 2010) and the impact of violence on the contours of urban space (Colombijn, 2016).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

959.8 ABD t

Penerbit

Singapore : Springer Nature., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

318 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9789819919956

Klasifikasi

959.8

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

History of Indonesia

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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