The History and Politics of Intimacy in Colonial and Postcolonial Southeast Asia, 1850-1950

FAIN: FEL-268493-20

Chie Ikeya
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8559)

Research and writing leading to a book on how mixed marriages and other intimate relationships shaped attitudes toward race, religion, and nation in Burma and Southeast Asia from 1850 to 1950.

My book project offers a new way of thinking about colonialism and its legacies in Asia that challenges the hegemony of the East-West encounter in scholarship on empire, race, religion, sex, and gender. It resurrects the forgotten, politically charged history of inter-Asian intimacies: sexual, emotional, and domestic partnerships among imperial and colonized Asian subjects. Based on imperial archival, vernacular, and oral sources in Burmese, Japanese, Chinese, and English that have never been brought together, the project explores shifts and continuities in perceptions, practices, and experiences of inter-Asian intimacy across British and Japanese colonialism in Burma between c. 1850–1950, and their political and social ramifications. Inter-Asian intimacies, it reveals, constituted the primary, and hitherto unrecognized, site for articulating and adjudicating modern understandings of race, religion, and nation that continue to vex Burma and other parts of Southeast Asia today.