Digitizing Chinese Englishmen: Creating a Nineteenth-Century “Postcolonial Archive”

Abstract

25 Interface Adeline Koh Digitizing Chinese Englishmen: Creating a Nineteenth-Century “Postcolonial Archive” One existing challenge to digital Asian and Asian American studies within the United States is the lack of specific funding for recovery efforts, specifically for digital work that concentrates on populations outside of North America. Of the 141 Digital Humanities Start-Up grants awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities from 2007 to 2010, only 29 were focused on diverse communities and 16 on diverse community texts. Additionally, no specific funding program is available for the digitization and recovery of Asian texts. This lack of support leads to problematic representations of the past in the digital archive and of the interconnections between different parts of the world in earlier time periods. In a previously published essay (Koh 2014), I documented that very little digital work is available on the nineteenth -century British Empire and its colonies and argued that the form of existing digital projects tends to obscure the connections of England to its empire. This article elaborates on an attempt to address this neglect— Digitizing Chinese Englishmen,1 an archival project on Anglophone writing in Southeast Asia—and shows how this project attempts to address racial bias both in content (through making available nineteenth-century Anglophone writing by people of color) and in form (by encouraging public commentary). Ultimately, Digitizing Chinese Englishmen addresses a Eurocentric bias within digital work in its attempt to “recover” work through creating a postcolonial digital archive. The term Chinese Englishmen refers to a particular part of the Anglophone Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, located specifically in Singapore and Malaysia. Under British colonialism, this group of Chinese subjects experienced the tensions of being torn between two Empires: 26 Interface the Qing Empire, which was under siege with the multiple Opium Wars, and the British Empire, under which they were considered British subjects . Although the “Straits Chinese” trace their history in Singapore and Malaysia back to the fifteenth century, they played a critical role in affirming colonial authority under the British, who, from 1874, established a system of “indirect rule” over Malaya. This system involved the establishment of a privileged class of non-Europeans who would serve as intermediaries between the British and the general masses. The British found this privileged class both in the Straits Chinese and in local Malay nobility. The Straits Chinese were ideally suited to functioning as a “comprador class” because they had developed a separate culture and identity from the local Malay inhabitants and new immigrants to the region from China and India. As a class, they enjoyed access to English education, positions within the new British Civil Service, and substantial business connections that were enough to create a solid mercantile class. I call these Straits Chinese the “Chinese Englishmen” because of the intense relationship of these Chinese subjects with the British Empire. Being part of the British Empire, they often termed themselves the “King’s Chinese” and largely adopted late-nineteenth-century Victorian norms, values, and modes of dress, and they considered themselves loyal subjects to the British Crown. The magazine published poems in tribute to Victoria’s 1897 Jubilee, which contain lines such as “All hail Victoria ! / Hail to her Jubilee! / Well may all the nations conspire / To praise her Sovereignty!” (Straits Chinese Magazine 1897b), and, upon her death, featured a black-bordered editorial. Philip Holden (1998, 86) notes that “if we look for an anti-colonial consciousness, the Straits Chinese Magazine is frustrating.” But at the same time, many Straits Chinese cultural norms exemplify what Homi Bhabha has termed a type of mimicry and hybridity, a mixture between colonial and “national” cultures.2 Digitizing Chinese Englishmen focuses on the digitization and commentary from the Straits Chinese during this period, when they were colonized by the British and compelled to negotiate between two foreign and competing empires. In particular, I focus on how these tensions were represented in the Straits Chinese Magazine, a journal that appeared in Singapore from the late nineteenth century, 1897–1907, containing a mixture of news, editorials, essays and short stories that were modeled after the British periodicals Blackwoods and Macmillians. Unlike previous periodicals, the Straits Chinese Magazine sought to give...