Shadow Plays with Imperial Pasts: Writing Wayang in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Fugitive

This essay investigates the implications of employing an inter-imperial heuristic within a longue durée timeframe for the study of postindependence Indonesian literature. It traces the history of shadow puppet theatre as a production of and vehicle for the politics of consecutive and contemporaneous empires in the Indonesian archipelago since the first millennium. Through a reading of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Fugitive (1950), this essay argues that the transmediation from theatre to text of this centuriesold performative tradition afforded post-1945 authors a symbolic solution for managing the legacies of their nation’s imperialistic encounters in their pursuit of an emancipatory cultural project.