Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Imperial Leather chronicles 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.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [397]-433) and index.
Table of Contents
Introduction: postcolonialism and the angel of progress -- The lay of the land: genealogies of imperialism -- 'Massa' and maids: power and desire in the imperial metropolis -- Imperial leather: race, cross-dressing and the cult of domesticity -- Psychoanalysis, race and female fetishism -- Soft-soaping empire: commodity racism and imperial advertising -- The white family of man: colonial discourse and the reinvention of patriarchy -- Olive Schreiner: the limits of colonial feminism -- The scandal of hybridity: Black women's resistance and narrative ambiguity -- 'Azikwelwa' (we will not ride): cultural resistance in the desperate decades -- No longer in a future heaven: nationalism, gender and race -- Postscript: the angel of progress.