Agnes Keith and Other Colonial Women Writers in Borneo

Agnes Keith and Other Colonial Women Writers in Borneo testifies to the great diversity of such writing and uniquely does this by showing the existence of a richly varied and heterogeneous range of text not only between man writers and woman writers but, equally, amongst the women themselves. These are women, moreover, who are writing within the same relatively small region of South East Asia. As Agnes Keith, whose writing forms the focal point of this book, credibly surmises, Borneo remained, even towards the end of the colonial period, a dark and mysterious land to people in the West, largely populated, as they imagined, by tribes of headhunters.

At its core, this book questions the very concept of “colonial” writing and, by extension, any such conveniently generalising terms and the assumptions which they inevitably attract. Similar to the problematic relationship between the historical notion of a “Romantic” period (which itself remains open to dispute) and the aesthetically and politically diverse writings of “Romantic-ism”, the colonial period accommodates a broad range of writings from implicit imperialist apologetics to riotous satire at the expense of the empire. A contradiction thus emerges, as acceptance of a historically designated colonial period seems to presuppose, in turn, a homogeneous corpus of literature, a unified cultural manifestation of “colonial-ism”.