| In the dissertation, I argue that the master narrative of nationalism in Indonesia represents only one set of voices in a highly variegated field of nationalist voices and "imaginings." Educated but marginalized women writers were instrumental in opening sites of contestation, as well as alternative modes of self-representation in the primary site of the dissemination of new ideas, the print media. To illustrate the internal struggle that developed between androcentric and feminist nationalisms, I present a geography of nationalist discourse in essays, letters, journals, and fiction from the 1900s--1950s in which gender became the locus for a discussion of tradition, modernity, and class. I show how a controlling male elite used the national language of bahasa Indonesia as a vehicle for the institution of gender roles through a selective incorporation into the language of terms and concepts from regional and Western languages and religio-cultural contexts. Narrative structures, in particular the androcentric nationalist coming of age novel, were likewise institutionalized by this elite to form the "foundational fictions" on which the nation was based.; In the lesser-known corpus of nationalist women's writing---the marginalized writings of Kartini, Hamidah, Suwarsih Djojopuspito, and S. Rukiah Kertapati---I trace the development of an alternative genre of female-centered autobiographical fiction depicting the ambivalence and complexity of the female experience of modernity, nationalism, and revolution. It is only by constructing a separate genealogy of female authorship, I argue, that we can understand how women deployed this hybrid genre to introduce unspeakable subjects and desires into the nationalist arena in an attempt to reshape personal and communal realities. Double-voiced structures play a significant role in these works as writers blur identities with their first-person narrators in order to speak to truth or avoid certain futures as silenced wives, co-wives, and mothers. Research into the writers' biographies reveals that despite their efforts, they could not find protection in writing from the exigencies that constantly threatened to, and ultimately succeeded in, forcing them back into silence. However, when read together in retrospect, their works constitute a force that destabilizes the structures and mythologies of Indonesian nationalist and literary histories. |
