Imperial Leather by
Anne McClintock explores the connection between race, gender, sexuality, class,
and psychoanalysis in material history. The book moves through three distinct
moments, from the height of British imperialism in the UK to the contemporary
hopes of dismantling the master's house in South Africa. The book is a rich
source of insights for anyone working on colonialism and its lingering traces
in the postcolonial present. McClintock interrogates the concept of
postcolonial, viewing it as eliding the complexities of global power not
readily marshaled into the binary of colonizer and colonized. Race, gender, and
class are not just separate structures but articulated categories, conflictual
and complicit.
In graphic illustration, McClintock reads Sir Henry Rider Haggard's map in King
Solomon's Mines (1885) and finds that the sexualized "lay of the
land" and the mounds covered in dark heather mark the entrance to the
treasure cave. The unknown, the female body, is also seen as a space of threat
and terror. Theodore Galle's engravings of America as a naked, inviting woman
are seen as signs of male imperial power feminizing terra incognita, with
cannibals and indigenous women spitroasting a human leg. The psychoanalytic
potential of these primal scenes is abundant, and McClintock exploits them to
the full, highlighting male fears of dismemberment and emasculation shadowing
imperial exploration.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gendered exploratory
tropes circulated back home, not just in the imperial office and men's clubs
but also in Victorian dominance. Commodity spectacles traversed the allegedly
separate spheres of private life and imperial market. Advertisements for Globe
Polish and Pear's Soap depicted whiteness and cleanliness, but imperial
presumptions of anachronistic space and panoptical time. Women, colonized, and
workers were rendered regressive, that is, anachronistic "before"
history.
In the panopticon of the Crystal Palace (1851), the globe was envisioned as one
time, human races were represented as "trees," or as a "family
of man," thus naturalizing and masculinizing racial hierarchy. Such
presumptions are found not just in popular advertisements, cartoons, and
postcards but in the grand narratives of scientists like Sir Francis Galton,
Paul Broca, Friedrich Engels, and Georg W. F. Hegel. Irish were depicted with
dark, simian contours as "white Negroes," sunk in torpor and domestic
degeneracy. Workers were portrayed as darkened and degenerate, and even
working-class women were seen as akin to black men.
McClintock explores these complicities of race, sex, and class through the
history of a protracted clandestine liaison between Hannah Cullwick,
maidservant and later secret wife, and Arthur Munby, barrister, poet, and
photographer of Victorian Britain. McClintock claims that his obsession with
"inspecting" working women-domestic servants, milkmaids, sack makers,
fisherwomen, and the mining women of Wigan Pit-was born of his infatuation with
his powerful nurse. She long refused him marriage and children, preferring paid
to unpaid domestic work and the pleasures and freedoms of life
"downstairs."
Metropolis and colony were connected by the "double crossings" of
commodities, as goods and as signs. Imperial progress became a commodity
spectacle, with images of black children becoming "almost white" with
Pears soap or Monkey-Brand soap crossing the threshold from the jungles of
Africa to the British doorstep. In this "domestication," women's
dirty work and that of the colonized are alike effaced.
Olive Schreiner's biographies connect colonial and metropolitan cultural
contexts, but her antiracist politics were compromised by the use of racial
stereotypes in her stories. Her books, most notably, The Story ofan African
Farm, evoked a sense of exile, transcended by a mystical union with feminized
nature.
The final section of the book explores the politics of colonial and
contemporary South Africa, focusing on the iconography of the mother in
Afrikaner and African nationalism. McClintock discusses the book The Long Journey
of Poppie Nongena (1980), which was a scandal in South Africa due to its story
of an African woman's violent struggle to survive apartheid and its uncertain
authorship. She argues that dialogics resurface in the awkward shifts of tense,
person, and voice in the telling, and ultimately, the "we" of
Poppie's community of women is the voice that prevails. This collective first
person, often applied to the life histories of women, working-class men, and
people of color, is read as a challenge to Eurocentric literary norms.
Cultural contests about style are related to the broader politics of social
transformation in South Africa. Resistance poetry and African performance works
were often dismissed by white critics as unliterary, drawing on indigenous orality
as much as English literature. McClintock plots a movement from the styles of
Sophiatown and the journal Drum to rural and urban shebeens where Sotho praise
poetry was refashioned in performances. Both proved a threat to the white
state, and Soweto poetry emerged in the context of the movement for Black
Consciousness, inflected by jazz and jive and Black American registers.
Imperial Leather is often brilliant but also copious, not quite connected, and
a bit uneven, especially in effecting the aspired mutual engagement between
psychoanalysis and material history. While psychoanalysis is deployed in
analyzing Freud's banishing of his nurse/nanny from his oedipal family
romances, the fetishism and cross-dressing of Cullwick and Munby, and the
biography and books of Haggard and Schreiner, it virtually disappears in
discussing contemporary South Africa. Daniels's Puritans at Play is engaging,
combining the anecdotal richness of classic New England chroniclers with
insights drawn from some of the best standard works of Puritan scholarship.
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