From Sastra Hijau to Sastra Bahari: Place, Resistance, and Indigeneity in Danum and Dari Rahim Ombak
Abstract
This paper examines contemporary Indonesian literature's engagement with the nation's ecological crises through a comparative analysis of Abroorza A. Yusra's Danum and Tison Sahabuddin Bungin's Dari Rahim Ombak. While existing studies of Sastra Hijau (Green Literature) have focused on terrestrial narratives, and emerging scholarship on Sastra Bahari (Maritime Literature) explores maritime spaces, few analyses have integrated terrestrial and maritime domains within a single framework. This study argues that examining forest and sea environments together shows how Indonesian fiction reconceptualizes place as a site of Indigenous knowledge systems that resist extractive capitalism and state complicity in environmental destruction. Using postcolonial ecocriticism and Blue Humanities methods, this analysis examines how Danum represents bioregional attachments threatened by palm oil expansion, while Dari Rahim Ombak depicts maritime cosmologies disrupted by blast fishing and structural poverty. The analysis reveals that both novels portray resistance as both vulnerable and adaptive, expressed through everyday cultural practices. Through its integration of terrestrial and maritime perspectives, this study demonstrates literature's critical role in showing the inseparable relationship between ecological survival and cultural sovereignty in contemporary Indonesia.
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