Rethinking Western representation of the Orient: China in Ana d'Almeida's diary

Abstract

We live in an era in which critique of the West has become a deep-rooted phenomenon of the lives of non-Europeans. My paper contributes to the study of European women's perception of China as mirrored in the nineteenth-century women's travel accounts and plays out the problem that undermines discursive tendencies associated with metaphysical binarism. Thus, my paper begins by proving Western women's involvement in imperial discourse, which challenges masculine assumptions about women and imperialism. Women's involvement in imperial discourse questions why women are still marginalized and silenced by dominant modalities of knowing and being. Drawing on Ana d'Almeida's diary, A Lady's Visit to Manilla and Japan, I attempt to investigate the ways of knowing, which resist conservatively established norms and boundaries. D'Almeida's use of imagination challenges narrative and other discursive efforts to represent knowledge as entirely resident within the discrete borders of established disciplines. This paper uses deconstructive analysis to explore imagination, where Chinese women are imaginatively granted the power to speak. Intellectually, analysis of such imagination, thus, demands disciplinary border-crossings, but the narrative remains within the disciplinary boundaries and narrative convention.

Keywords:

• Ana d'Almeida
• women's travel writing
• orientalism
• imperialism
• Macao

Notes on contributor

Eliza S.K. Leong, completed her Ph.D. in History at Catholic University of Portugal, is currently a Lecturer at Institute for Tourism Studies in Macao and an Executive Member of Macao Association for Historical Education. She has been working on issues and problems of critical significance in cross-cultural studies with special attention to the historical interactions between China and Europe on different levels – tourism, heritage, literature, culture, and so forth. She is actively engaging in research on gender and Asia and will be involved in archeological investigation in China.