A colonial by acquisition: ambivalent subjectivity in Agnes Keith's Land Below the Wind

Abstract

This article analyses the representation of the colonial British in Land Below the Wind (1939), an autobiographical travelogue by Agnes Newton Keith, the American wife of a British colonial officer in North Borneo. Whilst acknowledging the book's expressions of affection and qualified support for the British and their empire, the focus of our reading will be on several dramatic moments of imaginative and empathetic transgression from the more detached and empirical, essentially patriarchal norms of colonial discourse. These moments establish a finely balanced pose of ambivalence or a curiously “un-colonial” mode of colonialism, of emotional attachment to, but intellectual estrangement from, the British, suggesting, in turn, a nuanced, complex notion of colonial travel writing.