Curious Modernities

Early Twentieth-Century Balinese Textual Explorations

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3645673
AutoresHelen Creese (0000-0001-7497-3196, autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Volumen66
Número3
Páginas723-758
Fecha de publicación2007-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/s0021911807000940
OpenAlexW2064994998
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas27

The engagement of Balinese writers and intellectuals with the modern world began well before the final incorporation of the island into the Dutch colonial state in 1906-8. This essay analyzes three Balinese texts, each belonging to a different traditional Balinese literary genre, that were written around the beginning of the twentieth century. These texts, which deal with world events and geography, are Balinese reworkings of material from printed sources into indigenous forms of textual representation. They represent some of the earliest documented shifts toward modernity by indigenous Balinese writers and embody attempts to engage with modernity as a way of both understanding the West and coming to terms with new technologies. As examples of a localized translation of the foreign and the modern, they provide insights into how elite Balinese understandings of modernity were being constituted at the turn of the century

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Elite · Epistemology · Indigenous · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics) · Asian Studies and History · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy