Details

Author: Karen M. Teoh

Publication Date: 2018

Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc

Description

Schooling Diaspora relates the previously untold story of female education and the overseas Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore, traversing more than a century of British imperialism, Chinese migration, and Southeast Asian nationalism. This book explores the pioneering English- and Chinese-language girls’ schools in which these women studied and worked, drawing from school records, missionary annals, colonial reports, periodicals, and oral interviews. The history of educated overseas Chinese girls and women reveals the surprising reach of transnational female affiliations and activities in an age and a community that most accounts have cast as male dominated. These women created and joined networks in schools, workplaces, associations, and politics. They influenced notions of labor and social relations in Asian and European societies. They were at the center of political debates over language and ethnicity and were vital actors in struggles over twentieth-century national belonging. Their education empowered them to defy certain sociocultural conventions in ways that school founders and political authorities did not anticipate. At the same time, they contended with an elite male discourse that perpetuated patriarchal views of gender, culture, and nation. Even as their schooling propelled them into a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic public space, Chinese girls and women in diaspora often had to take sides as Malayan and Singaporean society became polarized—sometimes falsely—into mutually exclusive groups of British loyalists, pro-China nationalists, and Southeast Asian citizens. They negotiated these constraints to build unique identities, ultimately contributing to the development of a new figure: the educated transnational Chinese woman.

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