| dc.description.abstract | This PhD dissertation examines works of literature produced in response to catastrophic events in Indonesia (since the arrival of the first Dutch ships in the late sixteenth century) and Tibet (1950s onwards) through the lens of literary trauma theory. By doing so, the dissertation interrogates and re-configures some of the dominant trends of trauma theory and justifies the cross-cultural application of some of the theory’s concepts to non-Western traumas. Formulating such a theoretical framework to approach a set of seemingly incompatible literary works from Indonesia and Tibet serves dual purposes. Not only does this approach help me understand the individual and collective traumas of the Indonesians and the Tibetans, but it also helps me detect and locate precisely where the theory falls short. My thesis argues that both trauma theory and the literature from Indonesia and Tibet have much to gain mainly in terms of analytical clarity, once we allow them to transcend their cultural and geographical borders. This is however not to endorse unequivocal appropriation of the theory for the sake of the literature and vice versa.
The introductory chapter delineates how the dissertation plans to exploit trauma theory’s conceptual leanings and renew the theory as a suitable methodological tool in reading the literary representations of the trauma of Indonesia and Tibet in the texts chosen for my PhD project. In the second chapter on Multatuli’s Max Havelaar or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860), I discuss the crisis of witnessing in the context of colonial Java, mainly in terms of trauma’s belatedness, the exclusion of the victim’s voice from the dominant discourse, and problematic over-identification with the victim as a result of transference. In the third chapter, I look at how Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound (2002) bears witness to Indonesia’s hauntedness and thereby opens a discourse that could help Indonesians live with the ghosts of their past, present, and future, but not necessarily yearn for them. The fourth chapter on Alai’s Hollow Mountain: The History of Ji Village Part I (2005) explores the dialectical relationship between collective trauma and individual trauma, particularly in the context of a community coerced into a rapid modernisation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I also look at the notion of silence and repression, specifically in the context of censorship of literature and history in the PRC. In the final chapter, with the help of Naktsang Nulo’s memoir My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone (2007) and Tsering Dondrup’s short stories, both set in Amdo (Eastern Tibet), I examine trauma’s temporality alongside Buddhist temporality, and discover how the Amdowa (people from Amdo) attempt to negotiate these two temporalities to recover from one with the help of the other. While these individual texts betray symptoms of trauma and hauntedness evocative of the trauma of their subjects, this thesis argues that these texts could also be identified as the sites of response/address/witnessing to trauma, which could potentially transform the way we approach trauma. | en_GB |
