White Skins/Black Masks: Representation and Colonialism

by Low; Gail Ching-Liang

• ISBN13: 9780415081481
• ISBN10: 0415081483
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 1996-02-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

White Skin/Black Masksfocuses on the fiction and travel writings of Henry Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. Close friends as well as prominent figures of imperial and colonial myth-making, Haggard and Kipling were praised for their alleged knowledge of and ability to speak from within the "native" cultures of Africa and India. Narrators and characters in their fiction attest to a persistent fascination with the body-image of the "Other." Kipling's fiction in particular deals with disguise and physical transformation through the use of costume. This book addresses the psychic processes of negation, projection and reappropriation in the dynamics of pleasure/unpleasure and mastery/defense found in the work of these two writers. It also seeks to provide a historical context for understanding how these forces emerged from and were played out in contemporary society. The fascination with exotic cultures and the crossing of cultural boundaries provides some of the most strikingways in which a colonizing culture articulates its self-identity and authority.White Skin/Black Masksemploys the most recent thinking in psychoanalysis, anthropology and colonial discourse theory to analyze the manner in which fantasy and fabulation is always caught up in networks of desire and power.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	vii
Acknowledgements	ix
Note on spellings	xi
Introduction	1	(12)
Part I
Body/Border Lines	13	(23)
The Dominion of Sons	36	(30)
Mimesis of Savagery	66	(47)
Transitions	104	(9)
Part II
The Colonial Uncanny	113	(43)
The City of Dreadful Night	156	(35)
The Colonial Mirror	191	(47)
Loafers and Story-Tellers	238	(26)
Conclusion	264	(5)
Notes	269	(8)
Bibliography	277	(14)
Index	291