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.