“Totalizing Nusantara: On World Literature as Indonesian Literature” reads Indonesian literature as world literature through the Marxist method of totality. Offering an alternative to a framework that would reduce Indonesian literature to nationalist-historicist empirical content, this dissertation reads Indonesian literary texts from the colonial and postcolonial period as aesthetic critiques of capitalism, which they grasp as fundamentally colonial and racial in character and global in geographical and historical reach. Each chapter focuses on a specific period in Indonesian history—post-1870 Dutch imperial expansion, national independence, New Order anticommunism, and post-1998 decentralization—and shows how the literary texts produced around and about each period actively mediate the relationship between national diachrony and capitalist synchrony. This relationship appears in these texts not as content but as contradictions on the level of the aesthetic that are in turn taken up by Indonesian writers to be resolved through the invention of new forms. In this way, this dissertation reveals the untenability of separating cultural production from theoretical work and shows that Indonesian literature is already a mode of thinking.