On negotiated Archipelagic Southeast Asian identities: patterns of colonial resistance and nationalist identity formation in Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind and Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind and Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere are landmark texts about the colonial past of Indonesia and the Philippines. Published more than nine decades apart, these novels highlight significant issues in the post-colonial histories of the two countries. They illustrate recurring patterns of resistance relevant to the formation of nationalist identities as well as access to capital, education, social relations, religion, and ethno-linguistic affiliations during and after the colonial occupation, which provided a liminal space for negotiating nationalist identities between the colonizer and the colonized. This paper will employ an intertextual reading to locate the negotiated liminal spaces ‘within’ and ‘between’ the two novels, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theoretical model of negotiated identities and cultural differences in postcolonial discourses, as well as the theories on nationalism of Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith. An intertextual reading of This Earth of Mankind and Noli Me Tangere demonstrates the convergences and divergences in colonial resistance that shaped the negotiated national/ist identities of the two archipelagic Southeast Asian nation-states. The liminal spaces ‘between’ and ‘within’ these texts reveal the ambivalent positions in colonial systems, as well as the privileging of certain ethno-linguistic groups that can best serve as ‘translators’ for a monolithic and homogenized national project of postcoloniality in an archipelagic context. Furthermore, the roles of capital, knowledge, and religion will be examined as important factors in the formation of negotiated postcolonial identities. At the same time, it is essential to recognize the asymmetrical power dynamics between the colonizer and the colonized.