Overview

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 take 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. Anne McClintock explores the sexualizing of terra incognita, the imperial myth of the empty land, the dirt fetish and civilizing mission, sexuality and labour, advertising and commodity racism, the Victorian invention of the idle woman, feminism and racial difference, and anti-apartheid culture in the current transformation of rational power. Imperial Leather argues that the categories of gender, race and class do not exist in isolation, but in intimate relation to one another. Drawing on diverse cultural forms -novels, diaries, oral histories, poetry and advertising the book examines imperialism not only as a poetics of ambivalence, but as a politics of violence.

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9780415908900

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Reviews

The author and Routledge are to be congratulated on a big, beautiful book that many students of the history of sexuality will find alluring. -- Journal of the Historyof Sexuality Imperial Leather is what an academic book ought to be: intelligent, informed, socially committed, engaged, and engaging. -- Women's Review of Books Imperial Leather is a wonderful book. -- Women's Reviewof Books McClintock's magisterial study...is a daring articulation of the race-class-gender triad. -- Choice Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather takes a prominent place among a number of recent works...that question the relegation of the imperial enterprise to the back benches of the Victorian sensibility...Ms. McClintock's astute reading of novels, diaries, and advertisements, among other sources, demonstrates how images of domestic life can be incorporated into an ideology of imperial domination. -- The New York Times Book Review Imperial Leather is a very passionately written book, and the reader cannot help but be involved in the various texts that McClintock freely uses. Nothing escapes her hard, penetrating gaze...The work is thoughtful and well researched. I highly recomend it. -- Journal ofCarribean Studies This is a big book, in every sense of the word: big format, big ideas, big aim. -- The Canadian HistoricalReview Lucidly written, wide-ranging in its scope, supple and rigorous in its analysis, and impressive in its consistent theorization of gender in relation to other axes of power, Imperial Leather is a major contribution to materialist feminist scholarship. -- Signs Engaging and frequently brilliant. -- Victorian Studies

The author and Routledge are to be congratulated on a big, beautiful book that many students of the history of sexuality will find alluring. <br>- Journal of the History of Sexuality <br> Imperial Leather is what an academic book ought to be: intelligent, informed, socially committed, engaged, and engaging. <br>- Women's Review of Books <br> Imperial Leather is a wonderful book. <br>- Women's Review of Books <br> McClintock's magisterial study...is a daring articulation of the race-class-gender triad. <br>- Choice <br> Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather takes a prominent place among a number of recent works...that question the relegation of the imperial enterprise to the back benches of the Victorian sensibility....Ms. McClintock's astute reading of novels, diaries, and advertisements, among other sources, demonstrates how images of domestic life can be incorporated into an ideology of imperial domination. <br>- The New York Times Book Review <br>

Author Information

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 CriticalInquiry, Boundary 11, The Village Voice, and The New YorkTimes Book Review.

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