The Lacquer Lady, by F. Tennyson Jesse, is a rare example of a novel set in colonial Burma with a mixed-race, Anglo-Burmese protagonist, yet is overlooked by postcolonial literary critics.
Anglo-Burmese skin always intimates. It alludes to sexual transgression and to the other. It stretches the idea of skin and what may or may not be contained within it. It connects to and stands in for other skins (where skin delineates the limit of or is a metaphor for a subject). Through this continuous allusion, this contingency, it complicates rather than clarifies difference.
Drawing from the work of psychoanalyst, Didier Anzieu and filmmaker, Trinh T Minh-Ha, this paper examines the affects of limit on writing in George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days and explores the ethical and aesthetic implications of writing as limit.
In my writing I represent the Anglo-Burmese in colonial Burma and thus, I begin this paper with a question: how does a writer represent mixed-race subjectivity within the English-language literary tradition in a way that is ethically and artistically satisfying?
