Politics, Literature and the Nation Question: How a Book Put the Nail in the Coffin of a Dictatorship

In the 1980s the New Order’s ideological hegemony was cracked by the publication of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind in defiance of a government at the height of its repressiveness. Crucially, the publication also re-planted the seeds of an exiled national consciousness. The activity of new progressive forces accelerated and Suharto fell in May, 1998. For these last 20 years, Indonesia remains a democracy without an opposition despite it not being suppressed. A national consciousness which can frame an oppositional vision is still in process. Indonesia’s return from exile in the 1980s started a fermentation as yet unfinished. More than 30 years of near totalitarian political control marginalised dissenting thought and organisation. Steady economic growth, but without serious industrialisation, has kept Indonesia a society of the semi-proletariat and lower middle class, hampering the emergence of forces that can be the agencies of change.

Today the contradictions are not to be found among the theatre of the political parties as they prepare for elections in 2024. Rather the real contradiction is between the parties and what they represent versus the unfinished ferment seeking new dissenting national frameworks.  No side of this contradiction is guaranteed to emerge triumphant. This is, however, the contradiction that is framing all politics today.