Coolie Legend on the Deli Plantation

Tale, Text, and Temple of the Five Ancestors

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2899993
AutoresJosh Stenberg (0000-0002-6832-2909, The University of Sydney Australia Sydney), Budiman Minasny (0000-0002-1182-2371, The University of Sydney Australia Sydney)
Año2022
Volumen178
Número2-3
Páginas159-191
Fecha de publicación2022-06-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaBijdragen tot de taal- land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0006-2294 • E-ISSN: 2213-4379
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/22134379-bja10037
OpenAlexW4284681805
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas15

This article traces one narrative of anti-colonial violence on the Sumatra plantation through various Sinophone iterations and establishes the historical events on which it was based. The European anxiety about the defiance of the condemned Chinese men shows how this particular event turned into oral legend, religious observance, touring socialist theatre, leftist fiction, and a PRC Third World internationalist travelogue. In one moment of bravura, Chinese plantation workers rejected their status as colonial subjects. That gesture made them an emblem of the proletarian bona fides of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the traumatic origins of Medan and other North Sumatra Chinese communities in plantation labour. By connecting the foreboding in the colonial archive with the eulogy in the Sinophone literary record, we can triangulate a fuller vision of resistance on the Deli plantations than is available from either one

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Emblem · Judaism · Legend · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Proletariat · Asian Studies and History · History · Law