‘Sensations of Rootedness’ in Cosmopolitan Rangoon or How the Politics of Authenticity Shaped Colonial Imaginings of Home

Abstract

ABSTRACT Colonial Rangoon was once a famously cosmopolitan city, a significant trade port of the British Empire and one of the world’s largest migrant destinations. Mobility, foreignness and cross-cultural hybridity was essential to Rangoon’s make-up during the colonial period. This paper compares three texts, each written from one of Rangoon’s resident mobile cultural identities, that represent ‘sensations of at-homeness’ in the colony. I analyse associations and metaphors of ‘rootedness’ in the personal correspondence of Gordon Luce, the self-published memoir of Kenneth Tun Tin and an interview with a Japanese businesswoman, Ikuyo Okuma. Drawing on Kristeva’s (1991. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press) examination of the figure of foreigner in Western society in Strangers to Ourselves, as well as Greenblatt’s (2009. Cultural Mobility, A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Manifesto, I argue that ‘sensations of rootedness,’ imagined through associations with blood and soil, may be expressed as maintaining equilibrium. This paper contributes to understandings of ‘plurality’ in colonial Burma and ‘Anglo-Burmese’ experiences and identities.