This study skillfully integrates perspectives from history, political economy, and ethnography to unravel the complex interweaving of the education of Overseas Chinese females in colonial Malaya and Singapore with British colonialism, Chinese ethno-nationalism, patriarchy, and hybrid cultural identities. The archive-based narrative is enlivened by original interviews with Southeast Asia-born women who were schooled in the 1930s and 1940s, including some who were motivated by their education to re-migrate to China following the Communist revolution. Particularly striking are the different gendered worldviews embodied in English- and Chinese-language girls' schools, reflecting the different transnational as well as local political influences to which they were subject, within the same spaces.

Autorentext
Karen M. Teoh is Associate Professor of History and Director of Asian Studies at Stonehill College.

Klappentext

Schooling Diaspora looks into the motivations and strategies of missionaries, colonial authorities, and Chinese reformists and revolutionaries for educating girls, as well as the impact that this education had on identity formation among overseas Chinese women and larger society.

Inhalt

• Acknowledgments

• A Note on Spelling

• Introduction: Women, Education, and Overseas Chinese Identity

• Chapter 1: A Little Education, A Little Emancipation: The Colonial Politics of Female Education, 1850s-1950s

• Chapter 2: Barrier against Evil, Encouragement for Good: English Girls' Schools, 1850s-1960s

• Chapter 3: So That They May be an Honor to You: The Nyonya Problem and the Singapore Chinese Girls' School, 1890s-1940s

• Chapter 4: Rare Flowers, Modern Girls, Good Citizens: Chinese Girls' Schools, 1900s-1950s

• Chapter 5: Home is That Which I Adore: Re-migration to China, 1940s-1960s

• Conclusion: The Domestic Citizen and Female Education in the Postcolonial Era

• Notes

• Bibliography

• Index