Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa - Softcover

Magubane, Zine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226501779 ISBN 13: 9780226501772

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2003

Synopsis

How did South Africans become black? How did the idea of blackness influence conceptions of disadvantaged groups in England such as women and the poor, and vice versa?

Bringing the Empire Home tracks colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again to answer questions such as these. Before the mid-1800s, black Africans were considered savage to the extent that their plight mirrored England's internal Others—women, the poor, and the Irish. By the 1900s, England's minority groups were being defined in relation to stereotypes of black South Africans. These stereotypes, in turn, were used to justify both new capitalist class and gender hierarchies in England and the subhuman treatment of blacks in South Africa. Bearing this in mind, Zine Magubane considers how marginalized groups in both countries responded to these racialized representations.

Revealing the often overlooked links among ideologies of race, class, and gender, Bringing the Empire Home demonstrates how much black Africans taught the English about what it meant to be white, poor, or female.

About this title

About the Author:

Zine Magubane is an associate professor of sociology and African studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies.

Review:

"Magubane explores the deployment of images of black bodies from southern Africa in British discourse in the nineteenth century. . . . She raises important arguments and illuminates complicated interconnections between different colonial sites. . . . This striking study is both passionate and thought-provoking." (Elizabeth Elbourne American Historical Review)

"Magubane's book is a welcome intervention in the growing literature on the mutually constituitive relation between metropole and colony. . . . A stimulating study that deserves to be widely read." (Catherine Hall Albion)

"This book is a dextrous and innovative survey of the articulations between discourses of race, class, and gender in South Africa and Britain during the nineteenth century. . . . Overall, [the author] has succeeded in producing a readable, thought-provoking, and, in places, revelatory study." (Alan Lester Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0226501779
• ISBN 13: 9780226501772
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216