Postgraduate Seminar: Gender and Ethnicity in Research on Colonial History

Seminar Room A, Coombs Building #9, ANU

a seminar for Postgraduate students focusing on research techniques

Presented by Professor Frances Gouda, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam

Ever since the important work of Jean Gelman Taylor (1983) and Ann Laura Stoler (1991, 1995) on interracial sexuality appeared, many historians have been preoccupied with the different ways in which colonial societies in the past defined and configured relations of power and subservience on the basis of gender & ethnicity. Why was métissage (miscegenation) in French Indochina around the year 1900 constructed as an urgent social issue among policymakers and civil servants, whereas in French colonial culture in Algeria it hardly figured as political problem? What were the implications of the existence of the category “Eurasians” in British-India’s censuses and conversely, why was it significant that census takers in the Dutch East Indies classified most people of bi-racial descent as “European?”

In this seminar, Frances Gouda intends to address the differential manner in which diverse
colonial societies constructed different linkages between (white-skinned male) command and the subordination of white, hybrid and indigenous women. She will also explore the ways in which white women, sometimes voluntarily and at other times reluctantly, came to be
positioned as symbolic protectors of the ontological wholeness of the colonial system and
defenders of the putative superiority of European culture and morality in colonial Asia during the modern era.

Upon completing a degree in education in 1971 at the Rijkspedagogisch Academie in Utrecht, Frances Gouda studied at the University of Washington in Seattle WA, earning BA, MA and PhD degrees in history (1980). After teaching at Wellesley College, MA, The American University and The George Washington University in Washington D.C., she returned to the Netherlands in 1999. She served as post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies in 1983-84 and as a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in 1990-1991; she has received grants and fellowships from, among others, The Social Science Research Council, The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Fulbright Scholars Program, The European Science Foundation, The Rockefeller Archives Center and the American Philosophical Society.
 

Flyer [114KB]

RSVP to helen.mcmartin@anu.edu.au by 4.00pm Friday 25th November
 

hosted by
The Australia-Netherlands Research Collaboration,
College of Asia & the Pacific, and the
School of History, College of Arts & Social Sciences

Date & time

Mon 28 Nov 2011, 2–4pm

School/Centre

School of History

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