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‘What a Picture Can Do’: Contests of colonial mastery in photographs of Asian ‘houseboys’ from Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, 1880s–1920s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2018

CLAIRE LOWRIE
CLAIRE LOWRIE*
Affiliation:
University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia Email: clowrie@uow.edu.au
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Abstract

The archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian ‘houseboys’. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of ‘houseboys’ worked as a ‘visual culture’ of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , July 2018 , pp. 1279 - 1315
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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92 ‘Transcript of interview with Lim Ming Joon’, 23 September 1983, NAS, ACC 000334/07, pp. 25–6. The interview was translated from Mandarin to English by EthnoLink Language Services, certified by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI), http://www.ethnolink.com.au/translation/naati-accredited-certified-translations-australia, [accessed 15 March 2018].

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