National fictions: Chinese-Malay literature and the politics of forgetting

This dissertation examines the marginalization and eventual erasure of the literature written in Malay by the Chinese of colonial Indonesia. A substantial textual production between the 1870s and 1940s, Chinese-Malay literature disappeared not only from circulation in Indonesia, but also from popular memory. This dissertation traces the marginalization of this literature to the establishment by the colonial state of a bureau for popular literature, commonly known as Balai Poestaka. It finds the bureau's Western philosophy of literature and its promulgation in the colony to be the initial affront to the printed works of Chinese authors. Additionally, the authors' general distrust of modernity placed their writings in opposition to the Dutch colonial state, for which modernity was a sustaining ideology.; After the independence of Indonesia, marginalization of Chinese-Malay literature continued by way of exclusion from the national literature and renunciation of Chinese cultural practices. The dissertation examines the production of Indonesian national literature, its historical origin and ideological underpinnings, and the ways in which its thematic representations contradict those of Chinese-Malay literature. It also looks at the assimilationist project of the Indonesian state that led to the forgetting of the Chinese-Malay literature. The assimilation policy stipulated that the Chinese minority discontinue practices and dispose of symbols of Chineseness in order to be fully integrated to the Indonesian nation. In this way, it led to the abandonment of this literature and its eventual erosion from popular memory.; The dissertation has implications for understanding the shifting formation and politics of race in Indonesia, particularly those in relation to the Chinese minority. It demonstrates the subliminal ways in which the Chinese were constructed as "outsiders" through exclusion of their symbolic products, and conversely, how the absence of their cultural symbols reproduces an imagination of "unbelonging" for the Chinese in the Indonesian nation.