Abstracts & Bio Notes - Asian Studies Association of Australia

Bionote: Dr Karen Kartomi Thomas is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Theatre and
Performance (CTP) and the Performance Research Unit (PRU) at Monash University. She is
researching the theatre and performance of Sumatra including Lampung and the Riau Islands.
She is also coauthoring a book on the ceremonial performing arts of Lampung province based
on her research conducted in 2011-13. (karen.thomas@monash.edu)
TICKELL, Paul (UNSW, Canberra)
Title: Porn, Pap and Politics - Journalism, Literature and the Formation of the Early Indonesian
Left’
Abstract: The first modern political organisation in Indonesian emerges in 1908, in an
organisational sense seemingly out of nothing. Within 20 years there are a plethora of
organisations, representing a range of ideological positions and of these organisations the PKI
(Indonesian Communist Party is one of the most significant. The PKI was an organisation that
drew its membership from across the colony of the Netherland East Indies, a range of
ethnicities and social backgrounds. This paper attempts to examine the processes of Bildung
(education, role modelling and ideological formation) that allowed the members of this
organisation to identify as communists and to 'translate' communist ideology into a local and
personal context. The paper looks at both creative fiction, written by leading members of the
party (Marco, Semaun, Soemantri and others) as well as newspaper articles with a view to
understanding this process of identification.
Bionote: Paul Tickell teaches Indonesian at UNSW, Canberra and is Deputy Head of the School of
Humanities and Social Sciences. (p.tickell@adfa.edu.au)
TSAO, Tiffany (University of Newcastle)
Title: Global Environmental Discourse and Local-Colour Literature in East Kalimantan
Abstract: Literary works portraying a particular setting or culture (termed ‘local colour’ literature)
are often perceived as an attempt to counter the homogenising effects of globalisation,
describing local people, places, and events and documenting distinctive ways of life that the
latter threatens to obliterate. However, recent literary works from East Kalimantan show that
the relationship between local colour and globalization may not be as antagonistic as generally
thought. Short stories and novels written about Dayak culture associate traditional Dayak ways
of life with responsible stewardship of the natural environment, relying on terminology,
concepts, and strategies belonging to an environmentalist discourse that has become heavily
standardized the world over. This paper will examine literary works that utilize globalised
environmental discourse to depict traditional Dayak culture as closely aligned with
environmental conservation and sustainability, complicating the position of the Dayak in
relation to the past, present, and future, and undermining current trajectories of
modernisation and development being taken by the province.
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