Sharing the White Woman's Burden: Un-Colonial Colonialism in Agnes Keith's Land below the Wind

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

In her travelogue-memoir, Land Below the Wind (1939), Agnes Keith - the American wife of British colonial officer, Henry Keith - appears as a humorously self-deprecating, physically awkward and sensitive character, painfully stumbling through the rituals and customs of the British colonial community on the one hand, and those of the local Malay and Chinese people on the other. My reading will focus on several dramatic moments of transgression from the essentially patriarchal norms of colonial discourse. These moments are chiefly responsible for the text's warm, liberal sense of humanity, suggesting in turn a nuanced, complex idea of colonialism itself.