2025 Theses Doctoral

Red Nanyang: Chinese-Language Literature of Indonesia, 1945-1965

Borgonjon, David

This dissertation is the first full-length study of Chinese-language literature of Indonesia (yinhua literature) from 1945 to 1965. I demonstrate the existence of a flourishing print culture that became turned increasingly to the left during the anticolonial interregnum between the censorship of Dutch colonialism and the language ban of the New Order. I argue that this literature was deeply embedded within the framework of Sino-Indonesian friendship in ways which both enabled and constrained it.

My approach emphasizes the complex interplay of the international and the interethnic, and the strong pull that the ideal of communication across linguistic and social barriers exerted on this literature. Making extensive use of archives, rare books, and periodical sources from multiple languages and countries, I show how internationalist anticolonialism facilitated the transition from colonial subjecthood to postcolonial citizenship. Complicating the assumption that the Chinese-literate left was primarily interested in events in the “homeland,” I show how progressive culture pushed yinhua intellectuals to reorient their focus to Indonesian social life.

The first section surveys the historical development of yinhua literature and its substrate print culture, emphasizing the formative role of the linguistic context. The second section reexamines the writing of communist writer Baren 巴人 and his peers in relation to the Indonesian revolution and Afro-Asian translation. The third section delves into Guided Democracy literature through the exploration of two fraught social relations: capital/labor and teacher/student. A number of appendices provide information about Chinese-language print materials related to Indonesia.