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Engendering Tionghoa nationalism: Female purity in male-authored Sino-Malay novels of colonial Java
- Grace V.S. Chin
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- Journal:
- Journal of Southeast Asian Studies / Volume 52 / Issue 1 / March 2021
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 09 March 2021, pp. 110-132
- Print publication:
- March 2021
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- Article
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The recurring trope of female purity holds an important place in the Sino-Malay literature of colonial Java from the late 1910s to the 1930s, a turbulent and transformative sociopolitical period that also saw the rise of Tionghoa (Chinese) nationalism in the Dutch Indies. Used mainly by male writers who dominated the Sino-Malay literary scene, the gendered trope features polarised femininities — the archetypal virtuous Tionghoa girl, and the Westernised modern girl who defies Confucian traditions — and reflects the male perspectives and sexism of the time. I contend, however, that the trope reveals ideological motivations that go beyond patriarchal concerns, as it is also employed to articulate and perpetuate nationalist and anti-colonial ideas and views. Using theories of gender and nation as well as anthropological concepts of purity and pollution, I examine how the female body's inscribed purity draws on embedded epistemologies of race and gender to represent Tionghoa identity and nationalism in two male-authored Sino-Malay novels, Liem Hian Bing's Valentine Chan atawa rahasia Semarang (1926) and Tan Chieng Lian's Oh…..Papa! (1929). As my readings show, female purity as a nationalist ideology validates Tionghoa masculinity as the defender and guardian of not just woman's virtue, but also of an imagined morally and culturally superior Tionghoa nation.
4 - Ambivalent Narration: Kartini’s Silence and the Other Woman
- Edited by Paul Bijl, Grace V. S. Chin
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- Book:
- Appropriating Kartini
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 02 April 2020
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2020, pp 73-102
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Summary
Introduction
In studies on Kartini, observations have been made about the ironies and contradictions presented by the liberal, modern and feminist persona in her letters. Goenawan Mohammad for instance points out how Kartini would negotiate on “what to say and what is not to be said” (2005, p. vi) in her letters to Stella Zeehandelaar, noting that while she denounced women's suffering in arranged and polygamous marriages as well as their lack of access to education, she was also remarkably reticent when it came to divulging the truth about her own polygamous family background. Despite their shared passion in gender reforms, Zeehandelaar never knew that Kartini was the daughter of a selir, a secondary wife named Ngasirah. Kartini, who readily identified herself as a member of the priyayi, had omitted the fact that the “mama” she spoke of in relation to “Madura royalty” (Kartini 2005, p. 30; Kartini 2014, p. 75) was in fact her stepmother, Raden Ayu Moerjam, also the consort wife (or padmi) to the bupati of Jepara, Kartini's father. What I find interesting here, however, is not so much Kartini's attempt to hide her polygamous family background from Zeehandelaar, but rather the way in which her pride as a member of the priyayi class comes to the fore. Kartini's silence in fact smacks of complicity that is implicitly class-related. As a member of the privileged class, Kartini—despite her resistance against native patriarchy—had little to say about the lower-class women who occupied the ideological and material fringes of her world, including the selir and peasant women (Gouda 1995; Hawkins 2007).1 As Manderson states, Kartini's “contrary portrait of women imprisoned, literally and metaphorically, seems peculiarly bound by class and region” (1983, p. 2).
This Chapter examines how Kartini's silence about the Other woman— represented by the selir and female peasant in Kartini's own lifetime, and the lower-class women in the postcolonial context—problematizes the popular narrative of her feminist progressiveness in Indonesian history. Of significance here is the manner in which Kartini's class consciousness has been maintained and reproduced by entrenched attitudes and viewpoints towards women who occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder in post-independence Indonesia.
1 - Introduction
- Edited by Paul Bijl, Grace V. S. Chin
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- Book:
- Appropriating Kartini
- Published by:
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Published online:
- 02 April 2020
- Print publication:
- 10 January 2020, pp 1-16
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- Chapter
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Summary
This volume offers the first book-length study of the circulation and appropriation of Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904, henceforth Kartini), a young Javanese woman whose influential writings emerged during the colonial Dutch East Indies, and who is now recognized as an iconic feminist and nationalist figure in Indonesia and, after Anne Frank, the most well-known Dutch-language author in the world. Spanning across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in both Asian and Western contexts, this volume maps and interprets how varying state, social and cultural actors and institutions have appropriated her thoughts to articulate their views on the position of women, race, class, civil rights, nationalism and other subjects in (post)colonial and global Indonesia, Europe and North America.
The world has known Kartini since the publication of a selection of her famous letters in 1911 titled Door duisternis tot licht (Through darkness into light) (Kartini 1911). Before that, she was mainly known in Dutch colonial circles, as can be glimpsed from almost one hundred newspaper articles during her lifetime and in response to her death in 1904.1 Since 1911, she has been translated into numerous languages, including Arabic, Sundanese, Javanese, Japanese, Russian and French, but most influentially into English as Letters of a Javanese Princess in 1920 (Kartini 1920) and into Indonesian as Habis gelap terbitlah terang (When darkness ends, light appears) for the first time in 1922 (Kartini 1922, 1938). Between 1911 and Indonesian independence in 1945, Indonesian and Dutch newspapers devoted thousands of articles to her and to the “Kartini schools” named after her. Since then, hundreds of books, theses and scholarly articles analysing her life and letters have been produced (Delpher). In the 1960s, she was taken up by the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, with a foreword for the English edition by Eleanor Roosevelt and by Orientalist Louis Massignon for the French edition (Kartini 1960, 1964; see also Bijl in this volume, Chapter 3). In Indonesia, President Sukarno established Kartini's birthdate, 21 April, as Kartini Day (Hari Kartini) in 1946 and made her a national hero in 1964, while under the New Order of President Suharto, Kartini Day was transformed into an annual event that is still celebrated across the archipelago (Sears 1996; Rutherford's Chapter 5 in this volume; Robinson's Chapter 6 in this volume).