Gender Empire And Postcolony

Analyzing a wide body of cultural texts, including literature, film, and other visual arts, Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections is a diverse collection of essays on gender in Portuguese colonialism and Lusophone postcolonialism.

One of the first single-authored books to survey the role of sex and gender in the 'new imperial history', Gender and Empire covers the whole British Empire, demonstrating connections and comparisons between the white-settler colonies, and the colonies of exploitation and rule. Through key topics and episodes across a broad range of British Empire history, Angela Woollacott examines how gender ideologies and practices affected women and men, and structured imperial politics and culture. Woollacott integrates twenty years of scholarship, providing fresh insights and interpretation using feminist and postcolonial approaches. Fiction and other vivid primary sources present the voices of historical subjects, enlivening discussions of central topics and debates in imperial and colonial history. The circulation of imperial culture and colonial subjects along with conceptions of gender and race reveals the integrated nature of British colonialism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Authoritative and approachable, this is essential reading for students of world history, imperial history and gender relations.

An interdisciplinary analysis of gender, race, empire, and colonialism in fin-de-siècle Spanish literature and culture across the global Hispanic world. Unsettling Colonialism illuminates the interplay of race and gender in a range of fin-de-siècle Spanish narratives of empire and colonialism, including literary fictions, travel narratives, political treatises, medical discourse, and the visual arts, across the global Hispanic world. By focusing on texts by and about women and foregrounding Spain’s pivotal role in the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, this book not only breaks new ground in Iberian literary and cultural studies but also significantly broadens the scope of recent debates in postcolonial feminist theory to account for the Spanish empire and its (former) colonies. Organized into three sections: colonialism and women’s migrations; race, performance, and colonial ideologies; and gender and colonialism in literary and political debates, Unsettling Colonialism brings together the work of nine scholars.Given its interdisciplinary approach and accessible style, the book will appeal to both specialists in nineteenth-century Iberian and Latin American studies and a broader audience of scholars in gender, cultural, transatlantic, transpacific, postcolonial, and empire studies. “Each essay uniquely contributes to the theme of exploring the entanglements of gender and race through individual authors and texts in addition to those discourses that articulate Spanish colonialism and imperialism.” — Alda Blanco, San Diego State University

In this accessible combination of post-colonial theory, feminism and pedagogy, the author advocates using subversive and contemporary artistic representations of women to remodel traditional stereotypes in education. It is in this key sector that values and norms are molded and prejudice kept at bay, yet the legacy of colonialism continues to pervade official education received in classrooms as well as ‘unofficial’ education ingested via popular culture and the media. The result is a variety of distorted images of women and gender in which women appear as two-dimensional stereotypes. The text analyzes both current and historical colonial representations of women in a pedagogical context. In doing so, it seeks to recast our conception of what ‘difference’ is, challenging historical, patriarchal gender relations with their stereotypical representations that continue to marginalize minority populations in the first world and billions of women elsewhere. These distorted images, the book argues, can be subverted using the semiology provided by postcolonialism and transnational feminism and the work of contemporary artists who rethink and recontextualize the visual codes of colonialism. These resistive images, created by women who challenge and subvert patriarchal modes of representation, can be used to create educational environments that provide an alternative view of women of non-western origin.

Deep hiStories represents the first substantial publication on gender and colonialism in Southern Africa in recent years, and suggests methodological ways forward for a post-apartheid and postcolonial generation of scholars. The volume’s theorizing, which is based on Southern African regional material, is certain to impact on international debates on gender – debates which have shifted from earlier feminisms towards theorizations which include sexual difference, subjectivities, colonial (and postcolonial) discourses and the politics of representation. Deep hiStories goes beyond the dichotomies which have largely characterized the discussion of women and gender in Africa, and explores alternative models of interpretation such as ‘genealogies of voice’. These ‘genealogies’ transcend the conventional binaries of visibility and invisibility, speaking and silence. Works covering South Africa from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and Zimbabwe, Namibia and Cameroon in the twentieth include: • Colonial readings of Foucault • Ideologies of domesticity • Torture and testimony of slave women • Women as missionary targets • Gender and the public sphere • Race, science and spectacle • Male nursing on mines • Infanticide, insanity and social control • Fertility and the postcolonial state • Literary reconstructions of the past • Gender-blending and code-switching • De/colonizing the queer The collection includes diverse research on the body in Southern Africa for the first time. It brings new subtleties to the ongoing debates on culture, civility and sexuality, dealing centrally with constructions of race and whiteness in history and literature. It is an important resource for teachers and students of gender and colonial studies.

Globalizing the Postcolony: Contesting Discourses of Gender and Development in Francophone Africa is a study of development in the former French colonies of West Africa. It takes as its starting point the international community's reporting on human and social development and gender in the developing areas, which began systematically in 1990 and which has provided a framework for policy-making in this field. This study analyzes current thinking on the challenges facing gender and development in Africa, before moving on to examine the historical factors marking the gender and development profile of the francophone West African region. Through an analysis of gender politics in the region from pre-colonial to postcolonial times, the book examines the gradual incursion of exogenous gender policies into the region throughout the 20th century.

New Perspectives on the History of Gender and Empire, an open access book, extends our understanding of the gendered workings of empires, colonialism and imperialism, taking up recent impulses from gender history, new imperial history and global history. The authors apply new theoretical and methodological approaches to historical case studies around the globe in order to redefine the complex relationship between gender and empire. The chapters deal not only with 'typical' colonial empires like the British Empire, but also with those less well-studied, such as the German, Russian, Italian and U.S. empires. They focus on various imperial formations, from colonies in Africa or Asia to settler colonial settings like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to imperial peripheries like the Dodecanese or the Black Sea Steppe. The book deals with key themes such as intimacy, sexuality and female education, as well as exploring new aspects like the complex marriage regimes some empires developed or the so-called 'servant debates'. It also presents several ways in which imperial formations were structured by gender and other categories like race, class, caste, sexuality, religion, and citizenship. Offering new reflections on the intimate and personal aspects of gender in imperial activities and relationships, this is an important volume for students and scholars of gender studies and imperial and colonial history. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, Home and Harem examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal’s study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to discuss Indian women traveling West as well as English women touring the East. In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women’s suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad. Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.