Writing the past, inscribing the future : history as prophesy in colonial Java / Nancy Florida.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Florida, Nancy K.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Java (Indonesia)--History.

Java (Indonesia).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (471 p.)

Place of Publication:

Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile—working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend—as the work’s Javanese author demands—this history’s prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history’s episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography—thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

List of Maps and Figures

Acknowledgments

A Note on Manuscripts, Spelling, Pronunciation, and Translation

Titles in the Kraton Surakarta

Abbreviations

Introduction: On the Possibilities of Reading in Java

Chapter 1. The Writing of a History

Chapter 2. Babad Jaka Tingkir in Translation

Chapter 3. Invoking the Future in Writing a Past

Chapter 4. A Question of Visibility: Writing History in Java

Chapter 5. The Demak Mosque: A Construction of Authority

Chapter 6. Three Javanese Gurus: On the Generation of Marginal Powers

Conclusion: History and Prophecy

Appendix 1. Descriptive Table of Contents for Kupiya Iber Warni-warni Sampeyan-dalem kaping VI

Appendix II. Genealogy of Sarifi Ibrahim Madyakusuma

Appendix III. Meters of Babad Jaka Tingkir

Appendix IV. Opening Lines of Cantos: Babad Jaka Tingkir

Glossary of Selected Terms and Titles

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes a translation and critical analysis of Babad Jaka Tingkir.

Includes bibliographical references ([pages [427]-439) and index.

Description based on print version record.

Contains:

Babad Jaka Tingkir. English.

ISBN:

9780822378662

0822378663

9781322067438

1322067430

OCLC:

798792580