Constructing images of Indonesia and France in Leila S. Chudori’s Home
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Leila S. Chudori’s Home brings Indonesia and France into a transnational narrative shaped by political exile, cultural memory, and generational difference. This study examines how the novel constructs images of the two countries and how those images organize the characters’ negotiations of home and belonging. It applies a qualitative interpretive approach to the Southeast Asian edition of Home, translated by John H. McGlynn. Narrative passages, dialogue, settings, characterization, and cultural markers were collected through close reading and analyzed using Joep Leerssen’s imagological concepts of auto-image, hetero-image, and the relational construction of self and other. The findings show that Indonesia is represented ambivalently as a cherished cultural homeland sustained through food, language, memory, and diasporic solidarity, yet also as a repressive state that revokes citizenship and excludes political exiles. France is constructed as a space of refuge, freedom, and intercultural recognition, but it cannot fully replace Indonesia as a symbolic home. These images also vary by generation: Indonesia is a lost homeland for Dimas, whereas for Lintang it shifts from an inherited and unfamiliar image to an experienced, critically reassessed place. The novel therefore constructs national images as relational, changeable, and contested rather than fixed national characteristics.
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