Peripheral realism and cultural memory in Indonesian literature: Banyumas, social inequality, and rural modernity
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Abstract
This article examines how Banyumas Indonesian literature articulates social reality not as a passive local reflection but as a critical archive of peripheral experience within modern Indonesia. The study argues that Banyumas fiction produces a form of peripheral realism: a narrative mode through which rural poverty, local labour, early marriage, moral transgression, historical violence, and urban migration are rendered as interlocking structures of social life rather than as isolated social themes. Drawing on qualitative literary sociology, cultural memory studies, and world-literary debates on periphery and uneven modernity, the study analyses ten book-length literary sources consisting of two novels and eight short-story collections or anthologies by Banyumas and Banyumas-related writers, including Ahmad Tohari and writers represented in the Kembang Glepang anthologies. The corpus yielded thirty narrative excerpts, twenty-nine of which were assigned primary thematic codes while one was retained as an overlapping interpretive memo. The findings show that poverty is narrated as structural deprivation; coconut-sap tapping operates as cultural competence and economic precarity; early marriage exposes gendered intergenerational vulnerability; moral transgression reveals contradictions between normative discourse and lived social pressure; historical narratives transform DI/TII, 1965, and Petrus into cultural memory; and urbanization marks the ambivalent reorganization of rural identity. These six formations converge into a literary cartography of Banyumas as a peripheral site from which national contradictions can be read differently. The article contributes to Indonesian literary studies by repositioning regional literature beyond local colour and by demonstrating that peripheral literary traditions generate alternative knowledge about nation, memory, modernity, and social change.
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