Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales

by Laurie J. Sears

Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia.
Though Javanese shadow theater ( wayang ) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re–envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought—and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture.

Genres: Nonfiction

376 pages, Paperback

First published March 22, 1996

Reviews

[Elzira Rai · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nothing much to learn here, except the sections exploring how Dutch and Indonesian elites tried to read theosophical principles into the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The introduction serves a word salad in which the author hastily tries to tap into the main theoretical buzzwords of the 1990s (agency, Orientalism, postcolonialism, everything), one after the other, never pausing to actually reflect on what is being said. Unsurprisingly, these abruptly collaged "reflections" and the many gratuitous Benjamin, Foucault et al quotes that fill the introduction hardly have any impact on the rest of the book; their purpose is to suggest that the author is in touch, however vaguely, with then-current theoretical fads, not to guide the book's course or even inform the interpretation of the materials.

The author's foray into ethnography is particularly problematic. From claiming - despite the introduction's post-modernist fireworks - that her fieldwork in Java has given her the magical ability to see wayang performances through the puppeteers' eyes to discussing myth and narrative variants without a single mention of, say, Lévi-Strauss or performance studies, Sears is clearly in uncomfortable terrain here. But her ethnography is essential to the book, for it is supposed to be the basis of her historiography. While the section on theosophists delivers (despite the relative thinness of sources) a point, Sears' approach throughout the book is based on unproven "ethnohistorical" assumptions - for instance, that there was a "refinement" of wayang traditions in the 19th century to cater to the tastes of Dutch and Western-educated elites. More specifically, the author's main purpose and method is to fill documentation gaps by randomly dating the historical origins of contemporary oral artifacts: from Sears' perspective, wayang narratives and performances bear no other significance than the political moment she assumes they originated in, and are therefore reduced to mere "allegories of the colonial encounters".

[mahatmanto · Rating 3 out of 5]

laurie sears membuka buku ini secara menarik, dengan mengungkapkan bahwa orang jawa senang bila orang asing terlibat dalam upacara adat mereka. mereka juga senang bila orang asing bisa memainkan wayang, bisa menari atau bisa menyanyikan lagu-lagu jawa. atau malah bisa berbahasa jawa halus.
pernyataan ini menarik karena menyingkapkan kebenaran bahwa memang orang jawa sangat ramah terhadap pengaruh asing. identitasnya dibangun lewat perubahan-perubahan yang terjadi karena transfer ekspresi budaya dengan para tetamunya: entah menerima, entah memberi.