Not all children’s books provide the space to examine how children think and interrogate natural, cultural, and social phenomena through their cognitive and communicative lenses. However, Na Willa dan Rumah dalam Gang foregrounds children’s voices that are often overlooked, if not pushed to the periphery. Framing the text as a form of resistance narrative, this study aims to unravel how multiculturality is negotiated through the perspective of the novel’s protagonist and her interactions with adult characters. Given the focus of this study on uncovering the negotiation of multiculturality in a children’s novel, Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework is employed. Consequently, the findings are structured according to Fairclough’s three levels of discourse meaning-making. The first dimension of textual analysis examines authorial language style and intertextuality as tools for establishing an ideological stance. The second dimension highlights discursive practice in relation to the novel’s production and circulation. The third dimension employs recontextualization of critical multiculturalism (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 1999) to explore how the novel recenters the child as an active subject in meaning-making and in negotiating multicultural issues. In addition to recontextualized critical multiculturalism, the analysis also draws on linguistic and narratological understandings of discourse. This approach helps clarify how the author’s ideological orientation is textually manifested. The findings show that Na Willa dan Rumah dalam Gang situates children’s subjectivity at the centre of meaning-making around diversity, presenting it as a lived and celebrated experience rather than a merely anticipated ideal. Although children’s voices are recentred, adult characters still function as primary moral guides within the narrative. Overall, the study offers a renewed perspective on children’s literature as a medium for reimagining more nuanced forms of critical multiculturalism.
This study presents a comprehensive overview of a century of Indonesian poetry, short stories, and novels in terms of the development of literary motifs, namely a series of words that are repeatedly deployed and serve as the formal basis of the theme. This study aims to address the scarcity in the scholarship of motifs in Indonesian literature over the long term by aiming to present a diachronic analysis of the changing meaning associations of the most frequently appearing motifs in Indonesian poetry and prose over the past century. This very broad scope does not hinder the analysis because this study uses digital humanities approach, specifically Franco Moretti's distant reading, which is a computational analysis of the statistics of word occurrences based on a digitized literary corpus. This paper analyzes a corpus of 193 award-winning or critically acclaimed Indonesian poetry and prose books (novels and short stories) published between 1918 and 2025, divided into 10 periods, each covering 11 years (with the exception of the final period, 2017-2025, which spanned 9 years). This paper addresses the following research question: is there a pattern underlying the evolution of motifs in Indonesian poetry and prose from 1918 to 2025? The findings of this study are: (1) there is a trend of increasing lexical diversity in Indonesian literature, (2) a number of words that are central motifs in Indonesian literature have experienced changes in their meaning associations to become more abstract, and (3) there are stylistic similarities between works based on similarities in motifs across periods.
The play The Jungle by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson narrates the lifespan of a real refugee camp in Calais, France, with refugees of various nationalities building the camp together in a limited space before it is demolished by the French authorities. This article uses textual analysis to investigate the play’s representation of a borderless world within the camp itself to see whether it demonstrates an alternative to the larger world order configured by national borders and regulations on who and what may cross them. Specifically, it compares the mobility of humans and capital across borders as key elements of a borderless world. Relevant passages from The Jungle are selected and analyzed through close reading, using the original script as the primary source and existing documentation and research as secondary sources. The analysis draws on Kenichi Ohmae’s concept of a borderless world, Masao Miyoshi’s concept of the transnational class, and Harald Bauder’s and Giorgio Agamben’s work on territoriality. Research findings show that Salar’s restaurant becomes a means of asserting the camp’s legitimacy because its economic value appeals to the priorities of the nation-state, even as the refugees themselves remain excluded from secure political recognition and freedom of movement. While the play’s camp imagines a community beyond national borders, economic inequalities, divisions between national groups, and competing attachments to territory complicate this possibility. Ultimately, The Jungle exposes the asymmetry between the relatively unrestricted movement of capital and the constrained mobility of refugees, while showing how attempts to challenge the existing world order remain entangled in its structures.
In Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), the eponymous picaresque protagonist embarks on wanderings across regional, national, transatlantic, and social boundaries. Conveyed through a first-person narrative that blends satirical and picaresque aesthetics, the novel presents the worldview of a Scottish-born young man exposed to the vicissitudes of life during the period when the newly amalgamated United Kingdom was forging its path toward becoming a global empire. Rather than examining the novel’s historical impact on the social ailments of the eighteenth century that it satirizes, this article explores how the text constructs a literary imagination of a British Empire in the making. The protagonist’s role as an itinerant rogue grants him the narrative mobility necessary to expose aspects of eighteenth-century life that become targets of satire. By combining theories of satire, the picaresque, and abjection, this study argues that the novel’s narrative design both critiques and participates in the shaping of imperial ideology. Drawing on Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading method and Suvir Kaul’s postcolonial perspective, this article seeks to enrich discussions of the British Empire's fictional imagination. While existing scholarship has largely focused on the height of empire in the nineteenth century and its subsequent decline, this study returns to the mid-eighteenth century, when the vision and foundations of global empire were still being forged. The article argues that the novel reveals an ironic double stance toward colonial exploitation. While Roderick’s eventual rise to wealth and social status depends entirely on the plantation economy, the narrative remains silent about transatlantic slavery as the source of that fortune. This whitewashing of colonial violence exposes the deep moral ambiguities embedded in mid-century British expansion.
Bāsim Khandaqjī's novel Qinā'un bi Launi As-Samā'i (QBLS) attempts to create a narrative space for Palestinian history through a plot rich in historical and archaeological details. Using Walter Mignolo's theory of decoloniality, this study examines how Israel colonizes knowledge through its narratives. It also analyzes how QBLS performs decoloniality through epistemic disobedience against Israeli colonialism. A qualitative descriptive methodology was employed to investigate the colonial mechanisms embedded in the Israeli occupation. The findings reveal that Israeli colonialism in the realm of knowledge operates through the distortion of Palestinian historical narratives and collective experiences, including the denial of the crimes of An-Nakbah and the Hebraization and demonization of Palestinian resistance. This narrative is sustained through continuous retelling based entirely on colonial perspectives while excluding Palestinian lived experiences. These mechanisms are embedded in both explicit and implicit narrative structures, including the symbolic erasure of Arab cultural heritage, as exemplified by the narrative surrounding Mary Magdalene. Conversely, the novel articulates decolonial resistance by foregrounding local knowledge derived from Palestinian lived experiences and presenting it through a coherent, evidence-based narrative. This epistemic disobedience challenges assumptions of Western epistemological superiority and opens space for marginalized perspectives. The study underscores the role of literature as a tool of resistance and affirms Palestinian identity in the face of institutionalized oppression.
