Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature.įlorida reveals how this history’s episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography-thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study.
She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of 'tradition.' Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend-as the work’s Javanese author demands-this history’s prophetic potential into a more global register. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K.
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