The Embodiment of the Divine: A Javanese Court Poet’s Metaphysics of Man
The Sufi literature of “classical” Java turns on poetic evocations of spiritual embodiment produced through metaphysical explorations of the relations of God and the world particularly as realized through God’s relation to man. This metaphysics reflects, in part, the translation of the mystical speculations of the Syattariyah tarekat (a translocal Sufi lineage) into a Javanese lifeworld. With a particular interest in the metaphysics of man, my paper examines an early-nineteenth-century Sufi song that ecstatically charts the embodiment of divine spirit in man through the Reality of the Prophet Muhammad.
Biography
Professor Nancy Florida is a historian of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia whose work concerns Javanese and Indonesian history, historiography, and literary studies; Islam in Indonesia; and mass violence and trauma. She has worked extensively with the manuscript literature of central Java. With a PhD in Southeast Asian history from Cornell, she is currently a Professor of Javanese and Indonesian Studies at Michigan, where she served as Director of the University’s Islamic Studies Program from 2010-2012. Her most recent book, Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts Vol. 3 (2012), is the third of three volumes detailing the manuscripts in three royal archives in Surakarta, Indonesia. Other representative publications include: Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java (1995), “Sex Wars: Writing Gender Relations in Nineteenth-Century Java,” in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia (1996), “Writing Traditions in Colonial Java: The Question of Islam,” in Cultures of Scholarship (1997), and “A Proliferation of Pigs: Specters of Monstrosity in Reformation Indonesia” (2008). Florida has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and was awarded the Harry J. Benda Prize of the Association for Asian Studies for her book, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future. In 2012 the Republic of Indonesia presented her with a Special Ambassador Award for her contributions to Indonesian studies.