Search Results

This chapter charts how changing geo-political relations during late colonialism influenced conventional imperial ideologies of race, gender and identity and brought about a fundamental shift in women’s visual literacy. Through their unofficial, un-commissioned and private visual records of early post-colonial history, women were often able to promote new understandings of political, racial and gender transformations specific to crucial times for the British Empire and the Commonwealth. It argues that British women amateur filmmakers transcended traditional historical discourses in recording their own first-person narratives. The chapter centres on the analysis of particular sequences filmed in markedly different geo-political contexts by Queen Elizabeth II, Audrey Lewis, and two of Maharaja Vijaysinhji of Rajpipla’s British female friends. Their films prompt new perspective on how and why British women amateur filmmakers chose to record men as possible agents of national and imperial post-colonial identity. The cine-women discussed in this chapter witnessed and filmed radical shifts in representations of gender-driven, post-imperial roles within specific cultural norms and opportunities. As a result, questions of gendered and visual appropriation are considered in relation to feminist and postcolonial theories while acknowledging that the interpretation of British women's amateur visual practice often requires new methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches.

This chapter examines the processes of haunting, psychosis, trauma, and memory and how they are represented in the literary works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. More specifically, it looks at the story of Tirto Adhi Soerjo as told in the novels of Pramoedya's Buru Quartet, focusing on the final novel, House of Glass (Rumah Kaca). The chapter first provides a background on Buru Quartet before discussing House of Glass as a meditation on the creative tensions Pramoedya always found in the relationship between historical and fictional narratives. In particular, it looks at the character of Pangemanann to tackle issues such as hauntings and whether the dreams of the nation can survive in postcolonial modernity. It also considers the power of writing and the control of textual and archival materials and the ways in which novels might expand and enrich the Indonesian archives of the recent past by bringing issues of trauma and postcolonial masculinity into discourse.