Abstract:
The last two decades have given rise to a flourishing literature on the manipulation of sex, sentiment, and domestic arrangements in the making of empire. Yet, this body of scholarship remains limited by its preoccupation with relations between European men and “native” women, rendering some bodies and socialities more epistemologically relevant than others. In colonial Southeast Asia, unions between local women and the so-called Asiatic foreigners—namely, Chinese or South Asian men whose mass migration was encouraged by the various European colonial administrations—were far more prevalent than the former form of intermarriage. This talk explores these neglected intimacies of empire. It illuminates the struggles of women and men linked by relationships but separated by religion and race. At the same time, it raises questions about the coloniality of Asian migrants and settlers, reconsidering the degree to which Asian transcultural companionships and families served as strategies of extending foreign and masculine control over the affective and economic resources of Burmese and Malay—among other local—women and communities. Finally, the talk underscores the central role that the Orientalist discourse of “unassimilable foreigners” and the colonial plural legal system played in race formations and in limiting transcultural alliances in Asia as elsewhere in the age of global empire.
Short Bio:
CHIE IKEYA is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Ikeya received her PhD in modern Southeast Asian history from Cornell University and maintains an active interest in the related fields of Asian history/studies, women’s and gender history, race, gender and sexuality studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. She is the author of Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 2011). She is currently working on two new book projects: “South-South” transcultural intimacies in colonial Asia and the history of sexology in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Ikeya highlighted the struggles of women and men linked by relationships but separated by religion and race. She also reconsidered the degree to which Asian transcultural companionships and families served as strategies of extending foreign and masculine control over the affective and economic resources of Burmese and Malay women and communities. Her talk also underscored the central role that the Orientalist discourse of “unassimilable foreigners” and the colonial plural legal system played in race formations and in limiting transcultural alliances in Asia.
Please click here for the Youtube video of Dr. Ikeya's seminar.