Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore
Professor Seng is a historian of Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in how racial, gender and sexuality structures in the region have been shaped through the forces of Eurasian imperialism, nationalisms and global capitalism.
Born and raised in Singapore, he studies History at the University of Cambridge (BA), National University of Singapore (MA), and the University of Chicago (PhD). His first book, Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 2023), is a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). He maintains an interest in debates in world history, historiography and social, gender and postcolonial theory.
He is currently involved in three projects. First is a second monograph tentatively titled, “A Diaspora of Shopkeepers: Empire, Race and Chinese Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia (1870-1970s)”. With a focus on Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, this project is both a bottom-up history of the ethnic Chinese wholesale and retail trade, and a history of the racializing processes of economic knowledge formation. Second, he is writing a socio-cultural history of early Chinese television in Singapore for the Popular Culture in Nanyang Conference (to be held in November 2023). Third, he has been invited to contribute a chapter on Chinese migration and entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia for the early modern volume in the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (forthcoming, 2025).
Panel 5 | Circulatory Histories
MARRIAGE LAW REFORM AND CHINESE CONFUCIAN FEMINISM IN DUTCH INDONESIA AND BRITISH MALAYA COMPARED (1910s–1930s)
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In his historical sociology of Asian traditions and global modernity, Prasenjit Duara (2015) made this perspicacious observation about the predicament of local born (i.e. Peranakan) Chinese and their cultural identity in Indonesia, in the age of mass-based nationalisms: Confucian religion in the Dutch East Indies tended to become a kind of confessional nationalism and had to play a larger role than either as civic conscience or as privatized religion. This ideology had to both sanction reform and create an authentic foundation for Chinese identity.
But if reform and change eroded the authentic, they threatened identity. This is, of course, a classic aporia of nationalist ideology, and haunted the Peranakans no less than everyone else. (216) Commenting on the reformist trajectory of Kwee Tek Hoay (1886–1951), the foremost Peranakan Chinese reformer of religion, Duara (2015) notes how the Sam Kauw Hwee (三教会, Three Religions) Kwee created, “permitted the reformists to accept icons and popular practices but retain or, rather, reconstitute the transcendent. This transcendence responded both to the emerging power of Islam and to the modern interiorization of faith.” (218)
This paper builds on Duara’s conceptualization of the “traffic between secularism and transcendence” to trace the parallels and divergence in the emergence of Chinese Confucian feminisms in Dutch Indonesia and British Malaya in the 1920s and 1930s. In my own work, I have shown that patriarchal public Chinese voices in both colonies responded negatively to Dutch (1919) and British (1926) monogamous marriage law reforms, aimed at imposing gender-equal civic conscience among their Chinese subjects. (Seng 2023)
This initial colonial failure at imposing secular feminism, however, was met with the emergence of paternalistic forms of Chinese feminism in both colonies. In Java, Kwee Tek Hoay’s daughter, Kwee Yat Nio, served as the Chair of the Chinese Women’s Association (1932–40), and chief editor of the Maanblad Istri (Women’s Monthly, 1935–40). In the Straits Settlements, the wives and daughters of the Straits Chinese elite formed the Chinese Ladies Association (1918–today).
Comparing how women, encouraged by their fathers and husbands, emerged as public figures, and comparing their feminist concerns for their respective communities, this paper reveals an important and forgotten Chinese Confucian phase in the history of Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia’s plural feminisms.
