THE IMAGES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF COLONIAL WOMEN IN SINGAPORE, PENANG, AND MALACCA IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES

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2025-06-27

Author

Çiftçi, Gizem Mahmuriye

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Starting with the early years of the 19thcentury, Britain showed an immense interest in Southeast Asia as an outcome of imperialism. After 1867, the territory was referred to as “The Straits Settlements” at the southern tip of the Malay peninsula and became a Crown colony. The major cities were Penang, Malacca, and Singapore which functioned as pivotal hubs of economic trade and cultural exchange. By the end of the 19thcentury, when the process of globalization was gaining momentum, Southeast Asian society became integrated into the global system via Britain’s imperialist movement. To some extent, British gender norms began to be imposed on, and native women were one of the important affected groups in cultural life. However, cultural and local identities were complex in all contexts, and in line with Homi Bhabha's conceptualizations, theories like mimicry and hybridity can be employed to elucidate the contours of identities in a colonial context. According to Homi K. Bhabha, “the colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” In this scope, colonized people or societies aspired to be "acceptable" by their colonizers, and adopted or attempted to embrace the colonizers’ culture to gain their acceptance. In this context, analyzing these “new other” women in colonial Southeast Asia is very challenging because one may never be sure whether they experienced colonial mimicry or agreed to espouse the popular trends of the late 19thand early 20thcenturies. This paper will scrutinize the visual and written stereotype definitions related to the visibility and otherness of colonial women. The objective of this research will be to provide a more comprehensive examination of the colonial depictions of women as “other” in Southeast Asia by benefiting from a wide array of primary sources which includes photographs, illustrations, and depictions from everyday life documents.

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https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSchaJ3SMaM9m2A4rmKA6h3UkBQrfWHTuS_eU-XZXta8DQth9w/viewform
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115377

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Department of History, Conference / Seminar