ABSTRACT

In the mid-1990s, I examined the curious absence of ethnic Chinese in the

official corpus of Indonesian national literature, and the absence of any mention of the social tensions that arise from the unsettling position of this

ethnic minority (Heryanto 1997). By ‘official corpus’, I mean the 70-year-old

literary tradition, officially recognized as the nation’s literary heritage, produced

and circulated among state officials and intelligentsia, and used in text-

books approved for use in schools. According to the official history, such

literature began in the 1920s under the auspices of the colonial – subsequently

nationalized – publishing house, Balai Pustaka.