Writing The Past Inscribing The Future

Download or read book Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future written by Nancy K. Florida and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile--working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend--as the work's Javanese author demands--this history's prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history's episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography--thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.

Download or read book Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity written by Sean V. Leatherbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity considers the Greek and Latin texts inscribed in churches and chapels in the late antique Mediterranean (c. 300–800 CE), compares them to similar texts from pagan, Jewish, and Muslim spaces of worship, and explores how they functioned both textually and visually. These texts not only recorded the names and prayers of the faithful, but were powerful verbal and visual statements of cultural values and religious beliefs, conveying meaning through their words as well as through their appearances. In fact, the two were intimately connected. All of these texts – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan – acted visually, embracing their own materiality as mosaic, paint, or carved stone. Colourful and artfully arranged, the inscriptions framed human relationships with the divine, encouraged responses from readers, and made prayers material. In the first in-depth examination of the inscriptions as words and as images, the author reimagines the range of aesthetic, cultural, and religious experiences that were possible in spaces of worship. Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity is essential reading for those interested in Roman, late antique, and Byzantine material and visual culture, inscriptions and other texts, and religious life in the ancient Mediterranean.

Download or read book The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia written by Marieke Bloembergen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a new approach to heritage formation in Asia, conveying the power of the material remains of the past.

Download or read book Cultures of Scholarship written by Sarah C. Humphreys and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals and challenges the barriers to a truly international scholarship

Download or read book Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts written by Nancy K. Florida and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of the annotated bibliography of Javanese manuscripts housed in the Reksa Pustaka library in Surakarta, the first institutionalized library in the Indies founded and administered by native Javanese.

Download or read book Shadows of Empire written by Laurie Jo Sears and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia. Though Javanese shadow theater (wayang) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re-envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought--and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture. Shadows of Empire will appeal not only to specialists in Javanese culture and historians of Indonesia, but also to a wide range of scholars in the areas of performance and literature, anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, and postcolonial studies.

Download or read book Diary of a Time Traveler written by David Long and published by Wide Eyed Editions. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Meet some of history's most illustrious and interesting characters in this book that visits key moments of the past from around the world. When young Augustus falls asleep in history class, Professor Tempo decides to teach him a lesson and show him that history isn't boring at all! She hands him a magic diary, all he needs to do is write the time and place to travel there. Together they head out on a whistle-stop tour of history through the ages to meet some of the world's finest explorers, inventors, leaders, writers, composers and painters, including Albert Einstein, Mozart, Louis XIV, Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Christopher Columbus Genghis Khan, Emperor Titus in Rome, athletes at the very first Olympic Games, Tutankhamen in Egypt, and even Palaeolithic man as he discovers fire. Each double page spread introduces a different time and place, with an introductory text from Augustus which explains the sights and sounds, and accompanying captions from the Professor which provide key facts. A character index at the rear gives a short biography of all the historical characters covered, and a timeline helps to contextualize the different time periods covered.