Culture de l’imprimé et nouvelle frontière maritime à Rangoon et Penang

Abstract

From the mid-19th century, vast improvements in steamship and communication technology created an interlinked network of port-cities in the Indian Ocean and maritime Asia. Though Rangoon and Penang had starkly different relationships to colonial rule, they shared a lineage as multi-ethnic ports where various communities had existed side-by-side for centuries. The advent of the Victorian era fostered new class and racial divisions between them, yet also created a new feuilleton culture in the port-city with the mushrooming of newspapers, books, and a new reading public. Diverse ethnic and linguistic communities sought platforms to articulate their concerns and inform themselves of the affairs of the world, and their place within it. Burmese in Rangoon, imbued with a renewed sense of cultural pride, absorbed the rising tide of anticolonialism nationalism echoing throughout the world. Penangites transformed their society using the liberal, cosmopolitan tenants of imperial citizenship to make political and cultural claims for a multi-ethnic society. The vibrant, outward-looking atmosphere of the colonial port-city as a node of information and cultural exchange made Penang and Rangoon the intellectual staging grounds for new visions of the nation.