Negotiating Home and Exile: A Diasporic Reading of Dewi Anggraeni’s Journeys through Shadows

Abstract

This article examines Dewi Anggraeni’s Journeys through Shadows as a literary portrayal of Indonesian women’s diasporic experience in Australia. The problem addressed in this study is the limited critical attention given to the relationship between diasporic identity, gendered power, cultural displacement, and indigenous Javanese spirituality in Indonesian-Australian migrant narratives. This study aims to analyze how the novel represents Maryati’s search for home, identity, and belonging within the unequal social and cultural space of migration. Using qualitative textual analysis and close reading, the study examines the novel’s narrative structure, characterization, language, imagery, and recurring motifs through postcolonial, feminist postcolonial, diaspora, decolonial, and cultural identity perspectives. The findings show that Maryati’s diasporic identity is shaped by linguistic alienation, limited social power, gendered dependency, spiritual displacement, and psychological trauma. The novel does not present her identity as fixed or fully assimilated, but as caught between Javanese cultural memory and Australian social expectations. Javanese spiritual practices, such as tuyul and sesajen, appear as forms of cultural continuity and quiet resistance rather than as superstition or exotic background. Maryati’s marriage also reveals how gender, race, language, and respectability affect the agency and vulnerability of migrant women. The implication of this study is that Journeys through Shadows contributes to Southeast Asian diasporic literary studies by showing that diaspora should not be read only as geographical displacement, but also as a cultural, emotional, gendered, and epistemological struggle