From Chick Lit to Sastra Wangi and Back. The Global Circulation and Reevaluation of Contemporary Indonesian Women’s Literature

Abstract

Chick lit, an Anglo-American genre of popular fiction, is said to have gone global since its emergence in the mid-1990s. This article focuses on Indonesian sastra wangi (fragrant literature), an especially early and frequently cited ›global variant‹ of chick lit from the Global South. While many of the prototypical chick lit novels, depicting young professional women in search of Mr. Right, sold very well, the sexually and politically explicit sastra wangi also won prestigious awards. Most notably, Ayu Utami’s novel Saman (1998) has been translated into nine languages, earning its creator a place among Indonesia’s ten most translated authors. Considering these remarkable accolades, equating sastra wangi with chick lit and thus genre fiction is rather surprising and suggests a reevaluation in the context of its global circulation. This article applies the circulation method, a polycentric comparative strategy developed by Susan Stanford Friedman, to study the actors and processes involved in sastra wangi’s ›chick-lit-ization‹.