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This article makes a comparative, postcolonial-ecocritical analysis of two literary texts about the Cultivation System (cultuurstelsel, 1830-1877), a nineteenth-century, profoundly detrimental agricultural policy in colonial Indonesia. It compares the Dutch-language novel Max Havelaar (1860, Multatuli) and the Malay-language Hikayat Siti Mariah (1910-1912, Haji Mukti), the latter of which was first published as a serialized hikayat in the anticolonial newspaper Medan Prijaji. The article researches both texts on racialized representations of Javanese plant life. Inspired by Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s conceptualization of the ‘rhizome’, it interprets how the affective interactions between human and vegetative bodies de- and reterritorialize the bounded and categorized spaces of the colonial environment, as well as the dominant ideological structures. In Max Havelaar, this deterritorialization demonstrates a non-human agency, although it primarily functions in relation to the novel’s central ideological tension between progress and stagnation. Conversely, Hikayat Siti Mariah partly escapes this tension and opens up more radical possibilities of reterritorialization, resisting and reconfiguring the racial grammar of colonial society.
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