Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

by Mcclintock; Anne

• ISBN13: 9780415908900
• ISBN10: 0415908906
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1995-07-06
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Imperial Leatherchronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power. Anne McClintock explores the sexualizing of theterra incognita,the imperial myth of the empty lands, the dirt fetish and the "civilizing mission", sexuality and labor, advertising and commodity racism, the Victorian invention of the idle woman, feminism and racial difference, and anti-apartheid culture in the current transformation of national power. Using feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic and socialist theories,Imperial Leatherargues that the categories of gender, race and class do not exist inisolation, but emerge in intimate relation to one another. Drawing on diverse cultural forms--novels, advertising, diaries, poetry oral history, and mass commodity spectacle--the book examines imperialism not only as a poetics of ambivalence, but as a politics of violence. Rejecting traditional binaries of self/other, man/woman, colonizer/colonized, Anne McClintock calls instead for a more informed and complex understanding of catgories of social power and identity.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction Postcolonialism and the Angel of Progress	1	(17)
1 EMPIRE OF THE HOME	18	(186)
The Lay of the Land	21	(54)
Genealogies of Imperialism
``Massa'' and Maids	75	(57)
Power and Desire in the Imperial Metropolis
Imperial Leather	132	(49)
Race, Cross-dressing and the Cult of Domesticity
Psychoanalysis, Race and Female Fetishism	181	(23)
2 DOUBLE CROSSINGS	204	(92)
Soft-Soaping Empire	207	(25)
Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising
The White Family of Man	232	(26)
Colonial Discourse and the Reinvention of Patriarchy
Olive Schreiner	258	(38)
The Limits of Colonial Feminism
3 DISMANTLING THE MASTER'S HOUSE	296	(95)
The Scandal of Hybridity	299	(30)
Black Women's Resistance and Narrative Ambiguity
``Azikwelwa'' (We Will Not Ride)	329	(23)
Cultural Resistance in the Desperate Decades
No Longer in a Future Heaven	352	(39)
Nationalism, Gender and Race
Postscript The Angel of Progress	391	(6)
Notes	397	(37)
List of Illustrations	434	(6)
Index	440