Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study examines how Dewi Ayu’s body in Eka Kurniawan’s Cantik Itu Luka functions as a living archive of colonial and patriarchal violence reproduced across generations, and how Halimunda as a narrative space reveals the failure of nationalism to resolve historical trauma from a gendered perspective. The analysis draws on the concept of spectrality as introduced by Jacques Derrida and further elaborated within Cary Wolfe’s posthumanist framework. Methodologically, this research is qualitative in nature and employs a textual-critical approach through close reading of the novel. The findings demonstrate that spectrality enables a critical rereading of Indonesian history by foregrounding the ways in which the colonial past, gendered trauma, and the unresolved wounds of nationalism persist in haunting the present. Dewi Ayu, as an Indo woman marked by colonial violence and Japanese military sexual slavery (jugun ianfu), emerges as a living archive of historical suffering inscribed upon the female body. Her literal resurrection signifies the persistence of a past that refuses disappearance and continues to unsettle nationalist narratives shaped by masculinist and militaristic tendencies while marginalizing women’s experiences of pain. Furthermore, Halimunda is constructed as a collective space overshadowed by post-independence colonial resentment, revealing the inability of nationalism to fully heal social trauma. In this sense, the novel shows that the female body becomes a site where colonialism and patriarchy converge and are repeatedly reproduced through intergenerational violence. Through the lens of spectrality, Cantik Itu Luka can therefore be understood not only as a work of magical realism, but also as an alternative historical narrative of Indonesia viewed from the perspective of women’s embodied suffering under colonial domination.
Author: Yunita El Risman
Institution: Hasanuddin University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7172294750