making empire respectable: the politics of race and sexual morality in 20th‐century colonial cultures

Abstract

The shift away from viewing colonial elites as homogeneous communities of common interest marks an important trajectory in the anthropology of empire, signaling a major rethinking of gender relations within it. More recent attention to the internal tensions of colonial enterprises has placed new emphasis on the quotidian assertion of European dominance in the colonies, on imperial interventions in domestic life, and thus on the cultural prescriptions by which European women and men lived (Callan and Ardener 1984;Knibiehler and Goutalier 1985;Reijs, et. al 1986; Callaway 1987;Strobel 1987). Having focused on how colonizers have viewed the indigenous Other, we are beginning to sort out how Europeans in the colonies imagined themselves and constructed communities built on asymmetries of race, class and gender-entities significantly at odds with the European models on which they were drawn.These feminist attempts to engage the gender politics of Dutch, French and British imperial cultures converge on some strikingly similar observations; namely that European women in these colonies experienced the cleavages of racial dominance and internal social distinctions very differently than men precisely because of their ambiguous positions, as both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and as active agents of imperial culture in their own right. Concomitantly, the majority of European women who left for the colonies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries confronted profoundly rigid restrictions on their domestic, economic and political options, more limiting than those of metropolitan Europe at the time and sharply contrasting the opportunities open to colonial men.In one form or another these studies raise a basic question: in what ways were gender inequalities essential to the structure of colonial racism and imperial authority? Was the strident misogyny of imperial thinkers and colonial agents a byproduct of received metropolitan values ("they just brought it with them"), a reaction to contemporary feminist demands in Europe ("women need to be put back in their breeding place"), or a novel and pragmatic response to the conditions of conquest? Was the assertion of European supremacy in terms of patriotic manhood and racial virility an expression of imperial domination or a defining feature of it?With sustained challenges to European rule in African and Asian colonies in the early 20th century, sexual prescriptions by class, race and gender became increasingly central to the politics of rule and subject to new forms of scrutiny by colonial states. Focusing on the Netherlands lndies and French Indochina, but drawing on other contexts, this article examines how the very categories of "colonizer" and "colonized" were increasingly secured through forms of sexual control which defined the common political interests of European colonials and the cultural investments by which they identified themselves. The metropolitan and colonial discourses on health, "racial degeneracy," and social reform from this period reveal how sexual sa...

Sites of Desire: Chandrapore-Mayapore-Jummapur: Race, Sexuality and Law in Colonial India

“…(17). Anne Laura Stoler (1997) explains that "colonial authority was constructed on two powerful, but false, premises. The first was the notion that Europeans in the colonies made up an easily identifiable and discrete biological and social entity; a "natural" community of common class interests, racial attributes, who was "native," who could become a citizen rather than a subject, which children were legitimate progeny and which were not (Stoler, 1997: p. 635).…”

Absences and Silences: The Representation of the Tea Picker in Colonial and Fair Trade Advertising

“…Her image also hints at the sexual fantasies that operated within colonial societies of the exotic and sexualized 'other'. 19 As the language of colonialism in the 1920s changed to affirm the importance of partnership, images of the producer interacting with or acting as the consumer in the domestic space of the garden emerged repeatedly. The slogan 'From the tea garden to the tea pot' in one popular image from the mid-1920s is visualized in terms of an intimate exchange between two women who smile and share the produce of tea in an exchange reminiscent of women's support for each other as neighbours or mothers, both sharing the experience of domesticity (Figure 3).…”

Women and the Colonial State : Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies 1900-1942

“…('933-34) 569. 54 Huizenga,Koeliebudgetonderzoek,[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][23][24][25][26]30· 57 Ibidem,257. 58 Ibidem,242.…”

“…Even in dire economic circumstances (such as the economic crisis of the '930S) Dutch colonial families adhered to this ostentatious privilege of power. 23 Only a small number ofIndonesian/]avanese were, in fact, servants: in 1930 a mere 2 percent of the total Indonesian working population were classified as domestics, i.e., 350,000 persons 600,000 in Java, 50,000 in the Outer Regions). The actual number of Indonesians engaged (and registered) as domestic servants in 1930 seems to have been closely related to the presence of Europeans, rich Chinese, and the indigenous courts.…”