Indigenous communities are beyond a label of cultural identity; they represent a rich, evolving lived experience with inherent values. Indigenous ways of life transcend specific groups or regions, and most importantly, they refuse the narrow colonial frameworks (“backward,” “primitive”) that have long attempted to confine them.
Indigeneity can emerge from coastal societies (e.g., fishing communities) and lesser-known spaces rich in local knowledge systems, collective memories, and values shaped by long relationships with nature, history, and communal autonomy.
In literature, these experiences appear as lived practices grappling with everyday change—modernization among them. Writings born from such contexts—authored by those who live as sons and daughters of the land—record how customs, language, and community structures endure, or shift in value amid economic pressure, modernization, and forms of violence that often unfold outside public attention.
Literature opens space to trace structural issues affecting indigenous coastal communities. Issues such as human trafficking, labor exploitation, or social marginalization do not stand as isolated events but are highly interconnected. They stem from a long history of inequality, broken access, and intergenerational vulnerability. Through these narratives, such problems are read in their complexity, as conditions shaping everyday life in fishing (read: indigenous) communities.
Through this kind of reading, literature becomes a way to map relationships: between subject and object, between communal memory and structures of power, between what is called the center and the marginal. It does not offer a single definition of “custom” or “indigenous.” Instead, it opens possibilities for other maps—maps of trauma, survival, and life—that have long remained outside the spotlight of global literary discourse.
We may, for example, take fishing communities in Indramayu. Literature exists in oral forms such as fishermen’s tales, stories of how people seek partners, and mystical experiences at sea, narrated and shaped by fishermen’s relationships with the natural world they inhabit.
Beyond that, the fishing communities of Indramayu possess a rich manuscript heritage, reflecting historical layers of local wisdom and the intellectual life of coastal societies in the past—knowledge that remains relevant to be studied today.
We invite submissions of literary works originally written in Indonesian, whether unpublished or recently published.