M. Bodden Utopia and the Shadow of Nationalism; the Plays of Sanusi Pane 1928-1940
M. Bodden Utopia and the shadow of nationalism; The plays of Sanusi Pane 1928-1940 In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 153 (1997), no: 3, Leiden, 332-355 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com10/10/2021 02:25:40PM via free access MICHAEL H. BODDEN Utopia and the Shadow of Nationalism The Plays of Sanusi Pane 1928-1940 i Benedict Anderson's seminal work, lmagined Communities, among other things, uses several early works of modern Southeast Asian literature to demonstrate the emergence of a new kind of narrative perspective which could be associated with the general growth of nationalism in the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries (Anderson 1983:32-7). Subsequently, much work has been done on the links between literature and the construction of a 'national identity'. Fredric Jameson has gone so far in his thinking about the relationship between nationalism and literature as to claim that all 'third world' texts 'necessarily project a political dimension in the form of a national allegory' (Jameson 1986:69). Aijaz Ahmad, responding to Jameson's assertion and the article in which it appeared, countered that Jameson had turned all Asian and African critics and writers into mystifïed 'civilizational others'. He had done this, Ahmad claimed, by reducing all the issues dealt with by these writers and critics to the singular problem of a nationalist struggle against colonial oppressors and their post-colonial successors. Ahmad argued that it is necessary to avoid such reductionism, no matter how well- intentioned, by overlooking neither 'class formation and class struggle' as motivating forces in history, nor 'the multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender, nation, race, region and so on ...' (Ahmad 1987: 8-9).
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