Strangers in the Family - by Guo-Quan Seng (Paperback)

About the Book

"A gendered history of minority Chinese identity-formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial era. Told from the paradigm of women, This book shows that settler Chinese ethnic boundaries hardened over time through the community's construction and reinvention of patrilineal marriage norms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"-

Book 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.

Review Quotes

Strangers in the Family should be read widely by scholars of colonial intimacies, migration, gender, race, and religion in and beyond Southeast Asia.

-- "American Historical Review"

Strangers in the Family offers a wholly fresh perspective.

-- "Southeast Asian Studies"

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.