With her latest book, Chie Ikeya-a leading scholar of the histories of women in Burma/ Myanmar-invites readers to explore in-between imperial ideas and the lived realities of women.Focusing on intermarriage and religious conversion from the nineteenth century to the Japanese occupation, InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism offers a new framework to reconsider how we understand the historical complexity of people's belonging and its definitions within the matrix of imperialism and nationalism.The book's distinctive cornerstone is Ikeya's "inter-Asian" family history, with rich oral narratives and memories collected from family conversations.Combining this with investiga tions of different sources-from colonial legal documents to Burmese local periodicals and ret rospective memories of Japanese soldiers-the author demonstrates the significance of family history as a new repository of oft-ignored historical experiences.While "inter-Asian intimacies"-the pivotal analytical lens in this book-concerns transre gional connections (p.5), its significance lies beyond spatial connectivity in Asia.The author stresses that this focus enables the recentering of women who seldom appear as historical bro kers of contact and change.The author also claims that gender, intimacy, and colonial studies have been saturated with relationships and intercourse between traveling men-both European and Asian-and Indigenous women.In such studies, intercourse with European men is depicted as favorable, while intimacy among Asians carries connotations of inferiority and sub jugation.InterAsian Intimacies seeks to defy such imbalanced understandings.Stories of Auntie Rosie (the foster mother of the author's mother), Helen May (Auntie Rosie's mother), and Ma Galay (Auntie Rosie's grandmother) reveal the traversing of their lives through different lineages, languages, and religions.Starting with the life paths of Ma Galay and her husband, U Choe, Chapter 1 explains that racial and religious intermingling was common in precolonial Burma.Critically reconsidering
Hitomi Fujimura (Thu,) studied this question.