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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Anglo-Burmese
• Creative Writing
• Mixed-race
• Mobility
• Cosmopolitan
• Gordon Luce

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Michelle AungThin teaches at RMIT University in Australia. Her most recent novel, Hasina (Allen & Unwin 2019) in Australia and the UK and Crossing the Farak River (Annick Press 2020) in Canada and the USA, is about ethnic cleansing in Rakhine state. Her first novel, The Monsoon Bride, (Text 2011) explored cultural identity in colonial Rangoon. Her academic interests range from cultural histories of hybrid groups such as the Anglo-Burmese to contemporary creative practices in southeast Asia. In 2017, she was a National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow (supported by the Eva Kollsman and Ray Mathew Trust) and in 2014, the first Asialink writer in residence to Myanmar (funded by Arts Victoria).

Notes

1 Rangoon and Burma were renamed Yangon and Myanmar in 1989. I use the terms Rangoon and Burma to refer to these places prior to 1989 and Yangon and Myanmar to refer to these places after 1989.

2 Tun Tin is distantly related to the writer of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Library of Australia: [Grant Number 0000019435].