Female Imperialism And National Identity

Through a study of the British Empire's largest women's patriotic organisation, formed in 1900, and still in existence, this book examines the relationship between female imperialism and national identity. It throws new light on women's involvement in imperialism; on the history of 'conservative' women's organisations; on women's interventions in debates concerning citizenship and national identity; and on the history of women in white settler societies. After placing the IODE (Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire) in the context of recent scholarly work in Canadian, gender, imperial history and post-colonial theory, the book follows the IODE's history through the twentieth century. Tracing the organisation into the postcolonial era, where previous imperial ideas are outmoded, it considers the transformation from patriotism to charity, and the turn to colonisation at home in the Canadian North.

Imagining Home offers a unique examination of ideas and images of home in Britain during a period of national decline and loss of imperial power. In exploring the relationship between gender, 'race' and national identity, it higlights the continuing importance of empire in imaginings of the nation during a period of decolonization. Analyzing the significance of colonialism and racism in shaping ideas of motherhood, employment and domestictiy, it traces the process by which Englishness was increasingly associated with domestic order, and the home and family constructed as white. Drawing extensively on oral history and life-writing, Imagining Home examines the multiple meanings of home to women in narratives of beloning and unbelonging. Its focus on the complex interrelationships of white and black women's lives and identities offers a new perspective on this period.

This book, first published in 1995, demonstrates the central role of 'people', the empire, and the citizen in eighteenth-century English popular politics. It shows how the wide-ranging political culture of English towns attuned ordinary men and women to the issues of state power and thus enabled them to stake their own claims in national and imperial affairs.

The death of Princess Diana unleashed an international outpouring of grief, love, and press attention virtually unprecedented in history. Yet the exhaustive effort to link an upper class white British woman with "the people" raises questions. What narrative of white femininity transformed Diana into a simultaneous signifier of a national and global popular? What ideologies did the narrative tap into to transform her into an idealized woman of the millennium? Why would a similar idealization not have appeared around a non-white, non-Western, or immigrant woman? Raka Shome investigates the factors that led to this defining cultural/political moment and unravels just what the Diana phenomenon represented for comprehending the relation between white femininity and the nation in postcolonial Britain and its connection to other white female celebrity figures in the millennium. Digging into the media and cultural artifacts that circulated in the wake of Diana's death, Shome investigates a range of theoretical issues surrounding motherhood and the production of national masculinities, global humanitarianism, transnational masculinities, the intersection of fashion and white femininity, and spirituality and national modernity. Her analysis explores how images of white femininity in popular culture intersect with issues of race, gender, class, sexuality, and transnationality in the performance of Anglo national modernities. Moving from ideas on the positioning of privileged white women in global neoliberalism to the emergence of new formations of white femininity in the millennium , Diana and Beyond fearlessly explains the late princess's never-ending renaissance and ongoing cultural relevance.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its &“free market&” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country&’s poor, including women&’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women&’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women&’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and &“unfinished&” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women&’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist &“issue networks&” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

The Ideological Condition is a feminist critique of ideology as a barrier to self and social transformation. Himani Bannerji explores the problematic of praxis by connecting forms of consciousness and politics. We see how people make history in spite of hegemony.

The notion of citizenship is part of a national collective memory and a memory of individuals belonging to a specific geographical, historical and cultural context. The volume seeks to investigate the importance of women's relationship with citizenship and nationality from a diachronic perspective analysing different forms of writing in various European contexts. Many themes intersect in the different essays that comprise the volume, including the construction of female identity through religious ideology, the importance of translation and cultural studies as a source of feminine knowledge, and the relationship between public life and private domain within the multiculturalism of Europe. The intersection between national identity, women's writings and cultural difference surfaces in many essays and demonstrates how the notion of a necessary translation between cultures has been central for women authors since the seventeenth century.