Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925-2006)

Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born a century ago today. Toer is renowned for his critique of power and inequality in both colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, as well as his focus on women's struggles. Imprisoned in a camp on Buru Island, he created his masterpieces, which have since been translated into more than 20 languages. My colleague Rika Theo Rika has curated his works at the UvA library, now exhibited at the PC Hoofthuis library. A new biography of this prominent Indonesian writer is currently in progress by Prof. Dr. Remco Raben.

 

Literature on display
Nearly all of the publications are also available online as an e-book or a chapter within an edited book.

• Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Benedict R. O’G. Anderson. Tales from Djakarta : Caricatures of Circumstances and Their Human Beings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
• -  and Max Lane. This Earth of Mankind. Translated by Max Lane. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 
• -  and Max Lane. Child of All Nations. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1996. 
• -  and Max Lane. Footsteps. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. 
• -. House of Glass: A Novel. New York: Penguin, 1997.

• Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert. 'Short Stories by "Leftist" Writers: Who's Left?'. In: Silvia Mayasari-Hoffert, The Cold War and Its Legacy in Indonesia : Literary Representation of the Red Scare. 1st ed. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.
• Hendrik M.J. Maier and Vicente Rafael. 'Flying a Kite: The Crimes of Pramoedya Ananta Toer'. In: Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, 231–58. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
• Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, eds. Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
• Laurie J. Sears. Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013.
• Max Lane. Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship  [Unknown] Penguin Randomhouse Sea, 2023. 
• Rudolf Mrázek. Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. 
• Hersri Setiawan. Buru Island : A Prison Memoir. Translated by Jennifer Lindsay. 1st ed. Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2020.
• Razif Bahari. 'Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Interstitial Female Subjectivity in between Colonialism and Patriarchy: Women in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Tetralogy.' Indonesia (Ithaca) 83, no. 83 (2007): 41–77.
• L.L. Snelders. Hoe Nederland Indië leest: Hella S. Haasse, Tjalie Robinson, Pramoedya Ananta Toer en de politiek van de herinnering, Amsterdam, 2018.
• Jini Kim Watson. 'In the shadow of Solzhenitsyn : Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Kim Chi-ha, Ninotchka Rosca, and Cold War critique'. In: Jini Kim Watson Cold War Reckonings : Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021.

Other information (in Dutch)

• DBNL: Liesbeth Dolk, 'Pramoedya Ananta Toer en Multatuli', Indische Letteren 9 (1994) 95-102.