Sundanese Print Culture And Modernity In Nineteenth Century West Java

Sundanese books have been printed since 1850 up to the present. This article tries to draw a configuration of printing books in Sundanese for about 100 years in the Dutch colonial and Japanese occupation period. Printing and publishing books in Sundanese was initiated by the Dutch colonial government for the sake of management of their colony. This article discuss three aspects in print culture in Sundanese: (1) the role of government printing house and private publishers; (2) the cultural relationship between manuscript and printed books, and; (3) the changes after the emergence of printed books. Print culture in the Sundanese-speaking community was born and has developed. Its facets have changed from time to time. We notice more than 2200 Sundanese books were published up to the second decade of the 21st century when the technological innovation has proceeded in an enormous pace. However, the importance of Sundanese publication has not diminished in terms of nurturing educated citizens in this digital-oriented society and supporting cultural identity.

Sundanese Print Culture and Modernity in 19th Century West Java traces the development of modern printed books written in Sundanese, the dominant language in West Java, Indonesia, and the mother tongue of about 30 million people. Starting with the 'discovery' of Sundanese by Europeans in the early 19th century, Mikihiro Moriyama follows the developments in the ensuing century when a small group of Dutch scholars and colonial officials reshaped the language and its literature over the next one hundred years. Schools taught Sundanese, and printed materials based on western concepts began to influence indigenous writing and oral tradition. The imposition of European standards of literary aesthetics shaped a modernity that rejected traditional knowledge in favour of rational and empirical paradigms. Interest in traditional poetry and its mythologies declined, and new forms of prose, including novels, captured the attention of the reading public. These materials promoted useful knowledge and morality, and encouraged deference and loyalty towards colonial authority. Early in the 20th century, the establishment of the Commissie voor de Inlandsche School- en Volkslectuur (Committee for Indigenous Schoolbooks and Popular Reading Books), a government-subsidised institution, provided the growing number of literate people in the Indies with 'good' and 'appropriate' reading materials. Its development marked the end of an era when Sundanese writing competed with Western-style schools and publications, and signalled the triumph of the new colonial modernity.

This publication brings together current scholarship that focuses on the significance of performing arts heritage of royal courts in Southeast Asia. The contributors consist of both established and early-career researchers working on traditional performing arts in the region and abroad. The first volume, Pusaka as Documented Heritage, consists of historical case studies, contexts and developments of royal court traditions, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second volume, Pusaka as Performed Heritage, comprises chapters that problematise royal court traditions in the present century with case studies that examine the viability, adaptability and contemporary contexts for coexisting administrative structures.

The Dutch scholar Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) was one of the most famous orientalists of his time. He acquired early fame through his daring research in Mecca in 1884-85, masterly narrated in two books and accompanied by two portfolios of photographs. As an adviser to the colonial government in the Dutch East Indies from 1889 until 1906, he was on horseback during campaigns of “pacification” and published extensively on Indonesian cultures and languages. Meanwhile he successively married two Sundanese women with whom he had several children. In 1906 he became a professor in Leiden and promoted together with colleagues abroad the study of modern Islam, meant to be useful for colonial purposes. Despite his considerable scholarly, political, and cultural influence in the first decades of the twentieth century, nowadays Snouck Hurgronje has been almost forgotten outside a small circle of specialists, since he mainly published in Dutch and German. The contributors to this volume each offer new insights about this enigmatic scholar and political actor who might be considered a classic proponent of “orientalism.” Their detailed studies of his life and work challenge us to reconsider common views of the history of the study of Islam in European academia and encourage a more nuanced “post-orientalist” approach with ample attention for cooperation, exchange, and hybridization. Contributors:

Over time Dutch and Indonesian musicians have inspired each other and they continue to do so. Recollecting Resonances offers a way of studying these musical encounters and a mutual heritage one today still can listen to.

The interdisciplinary journal Brill Research Perspectives in Art and Law, aims to gather outstanding contributions to the fascinating debate at the intersection of art and law. The focus of the journal involves all the aspects (philosophical, juridical, sociological, technological and cultural) characterizing the relationship between law and art.

This book is the fruition of five years’ work in exploring the idea of superdiversity. The editors argue that sociolinguistic superdiversity could be a source of inspiration to a wide range of post-structuralist, post-colonial and neo-Marxist interdisciplinary research into the potential and the limits of human cultural creativity and societal renewal under conditions of increasing and complexifying global connectivity. Through case studies of language practices in spaces understood as inherently translocal and multi-layered (classrooms and schools, youth spaces, mercantile spaces and nation-states), this book explores the relevance of superdiversity for the social and human sciences and positions it as a research perspective in sociolinguistics and beyond.

Introduction: Translocal Anglo-India -- A Cultural Company-State and the Colonial Public Sphere -- Newspapers and Reading Publics in Eighteenth-Century India -- The Vagrant Muse: Fashioning Reputation across Eurasia -- Undoing Britain in Bengal -- Tristram Shandy in Bombay -- Agonies of Empire: Captivity Narratives and the Mysore Wars, 1767-1799 -- Literary Culture of Colonial Outposts: Penang, Sumatra, Java, 1771-1816.