In this lively book, Benedict R. O'G Anderson explores the cultural and political contradictions that have arisen from two critical facts in Indonesian history that while the Indonesian nation is young, the Indonesian state is ancient, originating in the early seventeenth-century Dutch conquests; and that contemporary politics are conducted in a new language, Bahasa Indonesia, by peoples (especially the Javanese) whose cultures are rooted in medieval times. Analyzing a spectrum of examples from classical poetry to public monuments and cartoons, Anderson deepens our understanding of the...

"'Come, let us build a Third Kingdom, and in this Third Reich, hey, sisters, you will live happily; hey, brothers, you will live happily; hey, kids, you will live happily; hey, you German patriots, you will see Germany sitting enthroned above all the peoples in this world.' How clever Hitler was, brothers and sisters, in depicting these ideals "

Thus the late President Sukarno of Indonesia, an anti-colonial leader, in a public speech while accepting an honorary degree, and viewing Europe and its history through an inverted telescope, as Europeans often regard other parts of the globe....

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization the question of literature has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance, with a starting point of Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, from which it travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. The book's concerns include the legacy of Goethe's idea; variable understandings of the term literature itself; cross-cultural encounters (the contact of the oral and the written, the paradoxes of exoticism); the nature of small literatures and the cultural politics of...