Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.96 (867 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0520231112 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 328 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-02-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Why, Ann Laura Stoler asks, was the management of sexual arrangements and affective attachments so critical to the making of colonial categories and to what distinguished ruler from ruled? Contending that social classification is not a benign cultural act but a potent political one, Stoler shows that matters of the intimate were absolutely central to imperial politics. Her acute analysis of colonial Indonesian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries yields insights that translate to a global, comparative perspective.. Gender-specific sexual sanctions, too, were squarely at the heart of imperial rule, and European supremacy was asserted in terms of national and racial virility.Stoler looks discerningly at the way cultural competencies and sensibilities entered into the construction of race in the colonial context and proposes that "cultural racism" in fact predates its postmodern discovery. It was, after all, in the intimate sphere of home and servants that European children learned what they were required to learn of place and race
"Crucial New Insight on Colonialism" according to Lawrence M. Yoder. This book provides remarkable insight on aspects of colonialism that is rarely broached in scholarly literature. That colonial powers and governments as well as businesses did so much to engineer, manage and control the sexual activity of people, both europeans and colonial subjects, and that on the basis of race, is
Cott, author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation "This new book brings our collective agenda forward with a degree of maturity and flexibility that makes narrow academic preferences both unnecessary and misleading."-Doris Sommer, author of Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in the Americas . "To my knowledge, there simply is no one else writing on questions of colonialism, gender, race, and intimacy who brings this depth and reach of historical and anthropological illumination to bear."-Nancy F