Refiguring women, colonialism, and modernity in Burma
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Refiguring women, colonialism, and modernity in Burma
(Southeast Asia : politics, meaning, memory)
University of Hawaiʻi Press, c2011
- : hard
Available at 8 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
-
Library, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization図
: hardAHBR||396.1||R117785569
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [205]-227) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala-""the woman of the times""-who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicised, earner and consumer, ""Burmese"" and ""Westernised,"" she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women, Chie Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyse both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who-whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles-unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernisation, and nationalism.
The first book-length social history of Burma to utilise gender as a category of sustained analysis, Refiguring Women challenges the reigning nationalist and anticolonial historical narratives of a conceptually and institutionally monolithic colonial modernity that made inevitable the rise of ethnonationalism and xenophobia in Burma. The study demonstrates the irreducible heterogeneity of the colonial encounter and draws attention to the conjoined development of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Ikeya illuminates the important roles that Burmese men and women played as cultural brokers and agents of modernity. She shows how their complex engagements with social reform, feminism, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism rearticulated the boundaries of belonging and foreignness in religious, racial, and ethnic terms.
Refiguring Women adds significantly to examinations of gender and race relations, modernisation, and nationalism in colonised regions. It will be of interest to a broad audience-not least those working in the fields of Southeast Asian studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and women's and gender studies.
by "Nielsen BookData"