Bodies in Contact

Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History

Author: Burton, Antoinette; Ballantyne, Tony; O'Hanlon, Rosalind; Teng, Emma Jinhua
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822334552
eISBN Pdf: 9780822386452
Place of publication: Durham , United States
Year of digital publication: 2005
Month: January
Pages: 464
DDC: 908/.2
Language: English

Caption

From portrayals of African women’s bodies in early modern European travel accounts to the relation between celibacy and Indian nationalism to the fate of the Korean “comfort women” forced into prostitution by the occupying Japanese army during the Second World War, the essays collected in Bodies in Contact demonstrate how a focus on the body as a site of cultural encounter provides essential insights into world history. Together these essays reveal the “body as contact zone” as a powerful analytic rubric for interpreting the mechanisms and legacies of colonialism and illuminating how attention to gender alters understandings of world history. Rather than privileging the operations of the Foreign Office or gentlemanly capitalists, these historical studies render the home, the street, the school, the club, and the marketplace visible as sites of imperial ideologies.

Bodies in Contact brings together important scholarship on colonial gender studies gathered from journals around the world. Breaking with approaches to world history as the history of “the West and the rest,” the contributors offer a panoramic perspective. They examine aspects of imperial regimes including the Ottoman, Mughal, Soviet, British, Han, and Spanish, over a span of six hundred years—from the fifteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Discussing subjects as diverse as slavery and travel, ecclesiastical colonialism and military occupation, marriage and property, nationalism and football, immigration and temperance, Bodies in Contact puts women, gender, and sexuality at the center of the “master narratives” of imperialism and world history.

Contributors. Joseph S. Alter, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Elisa Camiscioli, Mary Ann Fay, Carter Vaughn Findley, Heidi Gengenbach, Shoshana Keller, Hyun Sook Kim, Mire Koikari, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Melani McAlister, Patrick McDevitt, Jennifer L. Morgan, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Rosalind O’Hanlon, Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez, Fiona Paisley, Adele Perry, Sean Quinlan, Mrinalini Sinha, Emma Jinhua Teng, Julia C. Wells

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bodies, Empires, and World Histories / Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton
Part I: Thresholds of Modernity: Mapping Genders
- Masculinity and the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad / Rosalind O'Hanlon
- An Island of Women: Gender in Qing Travel Writing about Taiwan / Emma Jinhua Teng
- Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1700 / Jennifer L. Morgan
- Christian Morality in New Spain: The Nahua Woman in the Franciscan Imaginary / Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez
- Eva’s Men: Gender and Power at the Cape of Good Hope / Julia C. Wells
- Colonial Bodies, Hygiene, and Abolitionist Politics in Eighteenth-Century France / Sean Quinlan
Part II: Global Empires, Local Encounters
- Women, Property, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Cairo / Mary Ann Fay
- Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia, 1849–1871 / Adele Perry
- Native American and Métis Women as ‘‘Public Mothers’’ in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest / Lucy Eldersveld Murphy
- Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere / Mrinalini Sinha
- Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity, and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916 / Patrick F. McDevitt
- Reproducing the ‘‘French Race’’: Immigration and Pronatalism in Early-Twentieth-Century France / Elisa Camiscioli
- Race Hysteria, Darwin 1938 / Fiona Paisley
- Tattooed Secrets: Women’s History in Magude District, Southern Mozambique / Heidi Gengenbach
Part III: The Mobility of Politics and the Politics of Mobility
- An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmed Midhat Meets Madame Gülnar, 1889 / Carter Vaughn Findley
- Out of India: The Journeys of the Begam of Bhopal, 1901–1930 / Siobhan Lambert Hurley
- Celibacy, Sexuality, and Nationalism in North India / Joseph S. Alter
- Women’s Liberation and Islam in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1926–1941 / Shoshana Keller
- Gender, Power, and U.S. Imperialism: The Occupation of Japan, 1945–1952 / Mire Koikari
- History and Memory: The ‘‘Comfort Women’’ Controversy / Hyun Sook Kim
- ‘‘One Black Allah’’: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955–1970 / Melani McAlister
Postscript: Bodies, Genders, Empires: Reimagining World Histories / Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton
Contributors
Index