This book presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the women of the khit kala—“the women of the times”—who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicized, earner and consumer, “Burmese” and “Westernized,” the woman of the khit kala embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. This book interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in col ... More

This book presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the women of the khit kala—“the women of the times”—who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicized, earner and consumer, “Burmese” and “Westernized,” the woman of the khit kala embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. This book interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. It analyzes both the discursive figurations of the modern woman and the choices and actions of actual women who unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernization, and nationalism. This book challenges the reigning nationalist and anticolonial historical narratives of a conceptually and institutionally monolithic colonial modernity that made inevitable the rise of ethnonationalism and xenophobia in Burma. It demonstrates the irreducible heterogeneity of the colonial encounter and draws attention to the conjoined development of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. The book illuminates the important roles that Burmese men and women played as cultural brokers and agents of modernity. It shows how their complex engagements with social reform, feminism, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism rearticulated the boundaries of belonging and foreignness in religious, racial, and ethnic terms.