Besok ada di kolong Jembatan, di tepi Bengawan, antara Antah Berantah: the place of otherness in the dramatic literature of New Order Indonesia (1966-1986)

Indonesian New Order dramatic literature locates itself at the intersection of postcolonial and postmodern literary and performance studies, often serving the purpose of creating spaces for dissent and resistance against the state’s ideological apparatuses during a period of modernization [modernisasi] and development [pembangunan]. Although Soeharto’s government sought to unite Indonesians in diversity as an attempt to modernise the country through rapid urbanisation, economic growth, infrastructure improvements, and the creation of a new urban middle class, the dramatic literature of this period brings to light the regime’s more covert consequences of othering, segregation, and abandonment to achieve its goals. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Cobina Gillitt, Ellen Rafferty, and Michael Bodden regarding modern Indonesian theatre and representations of marginality, this dissertation positions itself in the broader dialogue of drama in the modern nation-state as a site of resistance. I shall examine how dramatic literature attempts to speak back to hegemonic power through the experience of the Other. By analysing how the Other negotiates its relationship with land and identity, social inequalities, individual desire and state ambition in Iwan Simatupang’s No Address, No Name (1966), Putu Wijaya’s Ought (1973), and Nano Riantiarno’s Time Bomb (1986), this thesis examines how New Order dramatic literature challenged and resisted the Master Narratives of progress, change and modernization that Suharto’s New Order regime sought to establish. This thesis thus argues that the participation of place in a politics of resistance ultimately proves that Indonesian drama was primarily concerned with reclaiming the Other’s subjectivity as a part of rather than apart from society.Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Art Histor