Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia

Seng, Guo-Quan

ISBN 10: 1501772503 / ISBN 13: 9781501772504

Published by Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2023

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 401280054

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia
• Publisher: Southeast Asia Program Publications
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501772503
• ISBN 13: 9781501772504
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In Strangers in the Family, Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java.

Departing from male-centered narratives of Ooverseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the Family tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women who were subordinate to, and alienated from, full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Seng showcases women's moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

About the Author

Guo-Quan Seng is Assistant Professor in the history departmentof History at the National University of Singapore. He is the coauthor of The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya.