The Portrayal Of Foreigners In Indonesian And Malay Literatures

This volume, comprising eight closely related articles which were originally presented at the EUROSEAS 2004 conference in Paris, examines the depiction of foreigners in a range of Indonesian and Malay literary works spanning four centuries, from traditional texts in Malay and Javanese to modern Malaysian fiction and a Singaporean novel written in English. Sharing ideas of Said's conception of Orientalism and its 'twin-brother' Occidentalism, and Todorov's theory of monological and dialogical inter-cultural and inter-ethnic relations, the authors of the papers concentrate on the problem of the 'other'. The crux of this problem is how literary discourse of the examined writers, both traditional and modern, reveals the images and perceptions of their Malay and Indonesian neighbors and the world beyond, the Western world in particular.