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). 

Departing from male-centered narratives of overseas Chinese communities, the book tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women. 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. It shows how contestations over women's place in marriage and in society were formative of a Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

Author

Guo-Quan Seng is Assistant Professor of History at the National University of Singapore. He is a historian of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in race and gender formations, and their intersection with the history of capitalism. He is now working on a second book project titled A diaspora of shopkeepers: Empire, race and Chinese commercial expansion in Southeast Asia, 1870-1970s.

Moderator

Tom Hoogervorst is a senior researcher at KITLV and interested in the languages and histories of Indonesia. He has done research on the language history of Malay, specifically the variety used in Chinese-Indonesian circles. In his recent research he studies Indonesian cuisines in relation to the wider world and how Indonesian cuisines have developed and adapted to local circumstances in the “diaspora”, specifically Suriname, Sri Lanka, and South Africa. 

Format, date, time & venue

This book talk is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Friday 18 July from 15.30 – 17.00 PM (CET). With drinks afterwards!

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Book cover Strangers in the family: Gender, patriliny and the Chinese in colonial Indonesia.

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