What is it about?
Agnes Keith was the American wife of a British colonial official in Sabah (Borneo) from the 130s - 1950s. Due to her marginal position, both as an American in a British colonial environment, and as a woman in a man's colonial enterprise, Keith's sometimes witty and at other times anguished account of her life as a memsahib, articulates a deeply ambivalent response to the general concept of empire, and the British Empire in particular. Thus suggested is a notion of colonial writing which is more nuanced or complex than it is traditionally perceived to be.
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Why is it important?
This study proposes a notion of colonial writing which is more nuanced or complex than it is traditionally perceived to be.
Perspectives
Agnes Keith has almost as much to say about the colonial English as she does about the native Malays and Chinese. This essay focusses on her first book, Land Below the Wind (1939), which is a lively, engaging and at times emotive account of her early years in Sandakan, during the most prosperous and peaceful years of Britain's colonial presence in Malaya and Borneo, just before this seemingly secure world was shattered by war and the Japanese occupation.
Dr Simon Peter Hull
Universiti Sains Malaysia
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This page is a summary of: A colonial by acquisition: ambivalent subjectivity in Agnes Keith'sLand Below the Wind, Studies in Travel Writing, October 2015, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13645145.2015.1103090.
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