ABSTRACT
In Indonesian popular discourse, globalization has been discussed in terms of a totalizing force that threatens to significantly alter all aspects of social life. This discourse has given rise to concerns that unless efforts are made to preserve local practices, they would be irretrievably lost. This chapter discusses the ways in which writers of Teenlit novels respond to the discourse. Three novels are studied to show how concerns for the survival of ethnic languages and cultures are presented as a narrative that highlights the experience of localization as a requirement for self-growth and subjectivity. Localization is considered here as a process in which contact with others and engagement in different cultural and linguistic practices enable one to develop the capacity to participate in the globalized world. Drawing on the notion of participation in interactive narrative field, which emphasizes the value of considering all kinds of contribution in the study of interaction, the chapter shows how localization is discursively constructed through the interaction between characters, bystanders, and narrator. Whereas analyses of subjectivity in adolescent fiction have focused on the development of the protagonist as subject, by adopting this approach, this study offers an alternative perspective that considers subjects as social agents linked to each other through discursive practices, a sense of interdependence, and spatial embeddedness.
