Every Book Has a Voice: A Postcolonial Reading of Gadis Pantai and Larasati

Abstract

Notwithstanding the Western domination of knowledge production in the world today, postcoloniality should be understood as an interaction between imperial legacy and local wisdom. Actively struggling to make meanings out of their colonial experience, the local people are not passive recipients of external influence and imposition. Such notions as hybridity and border crossing have thus challenged the geopolitical binary of “the West and the Rest”. The global scene of today is a conversation of many voices. This article argues that Indonesia, as a member of postcolonial society, has had its literature shaped by this global-local encounter during both colonial and postcolonial times. As it is, Indonesian literature has its role in having enriched the universal and local aesthetics in the formation of World Literatures. This argument is consolidated with textual analyses of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novels Gadis Pantai (2000) and Larasati (2000). Given the specific postcolonial conditions, the female characters in both novels come across as autonomous and having their individual voices that cannot be reduced into one single voice as that of “Third World Women”.