INTRODUCTION: REFLECTIONS ON HISTORY AS PROPHECY, CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

Abstract

In this essay, I provide brief introductions to the notion of “prophetic” historiography that I developed in Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (1995) and to the five essays of this forum that were written in dialogue with it. I argue that “history as prophecy” forms a practice of writing in which the “prophetic historian” seizes hold of a moment of past potency to self-consciously reinscribe it in the historian's present so that it may become a context for action in the futures of its readers. In my book, that argument is developed by means of a deeply textured reading of a unique nineteenth-century narrative history of Java's fifteenth-century transition to Islam, a nearly seven-thousand-line poetic history that was written by a royal exile. Each of the five essays engages my notion of “history as prophecy” in conversation, extending it into other realms of historical expression. The subjects of these five essays include contemporary performance cultures in Indonesia, an Arabic-language Islamic history of the Indonesian past, genealogical practices of Acehnese Sufis, and Indonesian literary history.