Locating "China's Alfred Wallace": Migration, diaspora, and the coloniality of the Nanyang encounter, c. 1920s-30s

Scholars and commentators on Chinese migration often distinguish between European colonizers and Chinese migrants, the latter of which are sometimes described as "colonizers without colonies" owing to the lack of formal state involvement in Chinese migration, and whose agents were in any case frequently targets of racist and exclusionary colonial immigration laws themselves.

This has tended to prevent Chinese migration from being considered as having colonial effects, particularly in the realm of culture, and the way in which some Han Chinese émigrés may have helped produce, or co-produce, the kind of hegemonic racial theorizing in Southeast Asia often understood as limited to the European colonial encounter.

This seminar explores the largely forgotten scientific and historical writings and translations of Huang Xuelou, and his collaborations with his even more forgotten Batavian Sino-Malay wife Lin Jie, as a window into the contradictory encounters of Chinese émigré intellectuals with the Nanyang (Southern Seas) during the May Fourth era.

Huang's amateur studies of the racial and biological ideas of Alfred Russel Wallace and the "Wallace line" across the Malay archipelago, as well as his production of other popular writings about the Nanyang, suggest a convergence of European and Chinese colonial discourses in their co-construction of racial ideas, and particularly ideas of civilization, indigeneity, Chinese acculturation and the "native" (turen), on the contested horizons of the Southern Seas.

About the speaker

Rachel Leow is an Associate Professor in Modern East Asian History in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University, and a Fellow in History at Murray Edwards College.

Chair: Dr Lars Laamann, Department of History, SOAS University of London.

Registration

This event is open to the public and free to attend, however registration is required. 

Please note that this seminar is taking place on campus and will not be recorded or live-streamed.

Organiser

• SOAS China Institute

Contact

• Email: sci@soas.ac.uk