Phoenix rising : narratives in Nonya beadwork from the Straits Settlements : 1870 to the present

Abstract

Until the first half of the twentieth century, Nonya beadwork and embroidery were important means of textile decoration for the Peranakans, the acculturated Chinese settlers in the Straits Settlements and the Netherlands Indies. Intricate and visually distinctive, Nonya beadwork is now regarded as a visual marker of a quaint Peranakan past. Its amalgamation of local, Chinese, and European influences is seen as a testimony to the celebrated hybridity of the Peranakan heritage. Yet despite the wealth of research on Southeast Asian textiles and the current intensification of interest in Peranakan material culture, no rigorous art historical study on Nonya beadwork has thus far been undertaken. This study contributes to the scholarship of Southeast Asian textile history by focusing on the relatively neglected area of needlework, demonstrating its potential as a source of cultural and historical information. This thesis also expands the perspectives on Peranakan Chinese decorative art by focusing on the historicity of Nonya beadwork, both as object and activity, such that beadwork becomes a tool with which to probe the social and symbolic world of the Peranakans...Whereas Nonya beadwork is now considered traditional, this thesis argues that the meanings imbued in beadwork have always been shaped by the Peranakans' concerns about the social and political milieux of the times in which they were created and used. For a migrant community located at the busy crossroads of the East-West trade, its negotiation of a precious but distant Chinese heritage and its ties to an adopted land were inextricably bound up with its encounters with the flow of ideas from East and West and the ways in which it confronted modernity. By unravelling the history of the Nonya beadwork through an analysis of the changes in the Peranakans' attitudes towards beading and the modifications of techniques, designs, and styles in beadwork, this thesis reveals the shifting expressions of Peranakan culture and identity in the Straits Settlements as the Peranakan community engaged with modernity, gendered norms, and an ancestral heritage in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, expressions from which Peranakan culture is conceived in the present.Australian National University in 2002/2003 and research grants from the Pasold Research Fund in the United Kingdom and the Bead Society of Greater Chicago in 2004