"A brilliant reinterpretation of Indonesian history, providing a wonderful access for historians and anthropologists to Indonesian culture. Indeed, it gives them the literary tools which they sorely lack and which, I fear, they don't always realize they lack. This is a major milestone in the study of Southeast Asian autobiography." --"Amin Sweeney, University of California, Berkeley"

Recent scholarly work on nationalism has revealed the importance of the nation imagined as a community. The subjects of these works, however, have been largely political speeches, polemical essays, and radical...