Environmental damage in the Indonesian 1965 Coup Literature

Violence, atrocity and human rights abuse in Indonesia have become part of the narratives of the 1965 Coup Literature. Not only has such body of writing enriched Indonesian literature, but it has also contributed to the history of Indonesia in a way inconceivable by the country’s official history. What has been scarcely documented, however, is the fact that environmental problems were also added to the dark past of the coup. Pollution, poverty, economic exploitation, land seizure are among the ecological injustice often surface in some Indonesian literary works using the 1965 coup as backdrops. This paper, therefore, is to examine Indonesian contemporary fiction in the light of Ecocriticism. It will discuss the ways in which ecological issues in several literary works need to be politically and ideologically contested