Becoming citizens of world literature: The global reception of This Earth of Mankind and Noli Me Tangere as Southeast Asian postcolonial novels
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Bumi Manusia by Pramoedya Ananta Toer and José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere are two Southeast Asian novels shaped by colonial experience and closely associated with the formation of national consciousness in Indonesia and the Philippines. This study examines how the two novels have been received and recontextualized beyond their respective national settings and how such processes have contributed to their circulation in transnational literary space. It employs a qualitative comparative literature review of academic publications addressing the two novels in relation to postcolonial studies, translation, comparative literature, and World Literature. The corpus was thematically coded according to national reception, translation and circulation, transnational recontextualization, and recognition within world literary discourse. The findings show that the movement of both novels from national canons into transnational literary space involves interconnected but distinct trajectories. Bumi Manusia is frequently recontextualized through translation, postcolonial criticism, and cosmopolitan readings, while Noli Me Tangere has developed a particularly strong afterlife through translation, canonization, education, and transcolonial readings. The comparison suggests that a work’s position in world literature emerges through circulation and successive acts of recontextualization that allow locally grounded historical experiences to acquire meanings beyond national boundaries.
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