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

Mcclintock, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415908906 ISBN 13: 9780415908900

Publisher: Routledge, 1995

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.

About this title

About the Author

Anne McClintock is an Associate Professor of English at Columbia University, and a SSRC-MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of monographs on Simone DeBeauvoir and Olive Schreiner, and has written for a number of publications on issues of gender and sexuality, including Critical Inquiry, Boundary 11, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Book Review.

From Library Journal

McClintock (English, Columbia Univ.) interprets 19th-century British imperialism as the focal point for that era's major "disclosures," including feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. She describes Victorian urban space?including advertising?as being oriented to exhibit imperial spectacle based on racism and sexism. In turn, the colonies become stages for exhibiting a reinvented patriarchy, with Westerners symbolizing power and indigenous peoples a subdued domesticity. The text is an exercise in demonstrating preconceptions. While some of McClintock's evidence is original, the argument as a whole is conventional bien-pensant wisdom unlikely to convince anyone not already committed to the thesis. The presentation is further burdened by its reliance on the cliches and jargon of feminism, deconstructionism, and other currently fashionable academic ideologies. Imperialism was at once a simpler and a more complex phenomenon than McClintock's perspective allows. For large academic collections only.?D.E. Showalter, Colorado Coll., Colorado Springs
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0415908906
• ISBN 13: 9780415908900
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464