Assembling Pasts, Projecting Futures: Reading Tintin Wulia's a Thousand and One Martian Nights With Nancy Florida's Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future

In Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java , Nancy K. Florida identified a form of Javanese historical writing in which telling the past is a political act, one oriented to envisioning possible futures. This essay examines an experimental video by the artist Tintin Wulia that resonates with this prophetic form of history. Wulia's video, A Thousand and One Martian Nights , blends documentary and science fiction to tell the stories of political prisoners sent to the island of Buru as if they were exiles cast away to Mars in 2065. Footage from the United States’ space program in 1965 contributes to the futuristic tone while setting the decimation of the Indonesian leftist movement within the context of US imperialism. This layered video unsettles the conventions of historical evidence and linear narrative, eschewing conventional documentary forms that the New Order regime appropriated for state propaganda. Wulia's collaged historical text challenges the evidentiary claims that underpin conventional historiography and reimagines the past to open paths toward more just futures. By staging an unlikely dialogue between Wulia's video and Florida's reading of the Babad Jaka Tingkir , this essay aims to extend the efficacy of Florida's text. It argues that, however profoundly engaged it is with a specific literary tradition and historical context, Florida's text offers us generative ways to think broadly about the politics and potentials of history‐writing in contexts of political suppression.