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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Guo Quan Seng, "Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia" (SAPP, 2023)
Description: In Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (SAPP, 2023), 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 overseas 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 mo...