Published on Department of History (https://history.washington.edu) Home > Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive Sears, Laurie. Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. Honolulu: U. of Hawai'i Press, 2013. Print. Laurie J. Sears Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive (Honolulu: U. of Hawai'i Press, May 2013) Dread and enchantment haunt twentieth-century Dutch Indies and Indonesian literature, but Laurie Sears suggests that these literary works can bring ine able experiences of trauma into narrative form. Sears sees certain literary works as situated testimonies, and they o er a method of reading the traces that elude archival constructions—emotional traces which historians may fail to record or witness. Sears's use of Donna Haraway's notion of "situatedness" reiterates the idea that all of us speak from somewhere. Testimony, especially eyewitness testimony, is a gold standard in historical methodology. The authors of literary works are eyewitnesses of their time, but literary works are rst of all written as literature. Literary or formal aspects cannot be ignored in the attempt to unravel the secrets and mysteries of the past. Those literary works that become situated testimonies can take their place in historical archives. As shown by various scholars, political factors in uence processes of shaping and preserving archival materials, and Sears looks at Indies and Indonesian archival constructions under colonial conditions and in the face of postcolonial state repression. Indonesia's famous author Pramoedya Ananta Toer knew how colonial and postcolonial literary works in uenced the way the past has been narrated in Indonesian archives. This way of reading follows French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean Laplanche's retranslation of Nachträglichkeit as "afterwardsness," where memories, like literature, can move us back and forth in time. In her research on 20th century literary archives, Sears found psychoanalytic theory moving back and forth between Europe and the Indies/Indonesia throughout the 20th century and beyond. She concludes that far from being a Jewish or European discourse, psychoanalysis is a transnational discourse of desire that has in uenced Indies and Indonesian writers for over a century. These ideas inspire Sears's thinking about historical archives, literature, and trauma. The cover ofSituated Testimonies features a photograph of Soekarno, Indonesia's rst president and nationalist leader from 1925-1965. 1 Related Links: University Of Hawai'i Press Laurie Sears Faculty Profile Status of Research or Work: Completed/published People Involved: Laurie Sears Research Type: Books Related Fields: History Literature Southeast Asia Department of History University of Washington 318 Smith Box 353560 Seattle, WA 98195-3560 Phone: (206) 543-5790 Fax: (206) 543-9451 histmain@uw.edu Source URL: https://history.washington.edu/research/books/situated-testimonies-dread-and-enchantmentindonesian-literary-archive 2