Nancy K. Florida

I am a historian of colonial Java and postcolonial Indonesia who is dedicated to a dialogic engagement with Indonesian subjects, living and dead. To help make this possible, both for myself and for others, I have spent a great many years of my life excavating the forgotten writings of a variety of Javanese men and women, writings that had hitherto lain unread, secreted away in the manuscript archives of Java. My most recent book, Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts, Volume 3: Manuscripts of the Radya Pustaka Museum and the Hardjonagaran Library (Cornell University SEAP Publications, 2012), is the last of three volumes detailing the contents of some 700,000 pages of Javanese manuscripts stored in four royal Javanese repositories: the Kraton Surakarta, the Pura Mangkunagaran, the Radya Pustaka Museum, and the Hardjonagaran Library. My aim has been and is to take the Javanese writings inscribed in these manuscripts seriously, which for me means engaging them not just for what they say, but also for what they can do. My book, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (Duke University Press, 1995), for example, is a densely textured study of a history of Islamizing sixteenth-century Java that was composed by a nineteenth-century royal exile to effect, I argue, a radically different direction for the Javanese future. I have written a number of articles, most of which work with Javanese manuscripts to suggest novel understandings of the Indonesian past. In addition to my work with the manuscripts, my research also concerns the narratives of contemporary survivors of the state violence of postcolonial Indonesia. My article, “A Proliferation of Pigs: Specters of Monstrosity in Reformation Indonesia” (Public Culture, 2008), for example, is a study of the visual and literary narratives produced by and around a contemporary painter (and survivor of the Indonesian gulag) and the potential effects of these artistic works in the monstrous time that followed the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship.

Current research interests and projects:

My current and future research concerns problems of history, politics, and Islam in the manuscript literature of colonial Java along with narratives of violence and trauma in postcolonial Indonesia. I remain committed to engaging the subjects of my research in productive dialogue, which often means endeavoring to produce deeply contextualized and provocative readings of their writings. I am currently working on a number of projects: a study of the place of the Syattariyah Sufi order in the nineteenth-century royal court of Surakarta; an exploration of the metaphysics of human embodiment in a Javanese Sufi poem composed in Aceh by a Surakartan court poet; a translation and analysis of The Master of All Perils, a remarkable satirical work by Java’s most celebrated “classical” poet (Ronggawarsita); a consideration of that same classical poet’s confrontation with modernity; and, finally, as part of a NEH project, critical translations of the lyrics of the sacred bedhayan songs of the Surakarta palace.  I am anticipating work on a new project that will explore the shape of traumatic memory in the narratives of violence only now being produced by survivors of the 1965-66 massacre of the Indonesian Left.

Teaching interests:

I offer a range of courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels that concern various aspects of Indonesian cultural history; Islam in Southeast Asia; Sufi thought in Indonesia; genocide and trauma in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Europe; and critical theory in the study of Asia.