The Afterwardsness of History

Abstract

This book examines how literature affects the upstream flow of history by considering the works of a number of Dutch Indies and Indonesian writers since the twentieth century. Using literary and historiographical ways of reading, it explores colonial and postcolonial novels and novellas of the Indies and Indonesia as situated testimonies and how they illuminate nationalist narratives and imperial histories. It explains how the experience of trauma, an experience that psychoanalysts argue cannot be held in memory or narrated in linear form from memory, can be expressed in historical or literary works. It also discusses the themes of dread and enchantment that haunt twentieth-century Dutch Indies and Indonesian literary archives. It shows that colonial and postcolonial literary works influence the way the past has been narrated in particular Indonesian archives—a way of reading that follows the logic of French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean Laplanche's notion of “afterwardsness.”