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Chie Ikeya, Guo-Quan Seng. Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 415–417, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae546
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Guo-Quan Seng’s Strangers in the Family is a meticulously researched history of the formation of a settler Chinese community in Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule (1816–1942). Based on an impressive array of sources, including Dutch government records, the administrative and judicial documents of the Chinese Council of Batavia, and Sino-Malay vernacular press materials, it tackles a key question in the scholarship on Chinese migration and diaspora: How did the Chinese come to be essentialized as a patrilineal race and perpetual outsiders within? The book reflects a paradigm shift in the historiography on Asian mobility in the era of European colonial empires. In a departure from the conventional focus on the labor, capital, and intellect of men, Seng places women and gender at the center of his analysis and uncovers an obscured history of intimacies and estrangements between Asian migrant-to-settlers (his term, more on this later) and Indigenous and local-born women. He shows how profoundly these inter-Asian dynamics—and their regulation by the settler Chinese community—shaped modern ideas about identity and belonging. The result is a compelling challenge to the Eurocentrism of postcolonial studies that remains preoccupied with the European management of race, sex, and desire.
