Colonialism and Homosexuality (review)

Both the theme and approach of Robert Aldrich's gargantuan Colonialism and Homosexuality constitute textbook examples of New Historicism's methods. Extrapolating from "micro-histories" of male intimacy in imperial settings, this book is noteworthy for its broad sweep and its encyclopedic scholarship. It embraces a variety of colonial contexts— French, British, American, Russian, and so forth—and works within a broad chronological range. Beginning with a chapter on explorers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Burton, Nikolay Przhevalsky, and Henry Morton Stanley, Aldrich moves on to military figures, government officials such as Cecil Rhodes, and a slew of writers and artists and even composers who engaged with same-sex desires. He covers settler colonies and occupation colonies and offers case studies of Australia, Melanesia, South Asia, and Algeria. There may be no surprises in Aldrich's choice of topics—scandals, for instance, have long been a central subject for historians of sexuality—but the work's range and its attention to a number of lesser-known figures means that it presents a lively and variegated picture of the different colonial geographies he explores.

Unlike the best instances of the New Historicist approach, however, Colonialism and Homosexuality does a poor job of connecting the dots—his micro-histories are both inadequately theorized and insufficiently tied together. The book is marred by an overemphasis on the somewhat outdated thesis that the colonies were a space of sexual liberation for men who did not fit the metropole's mold. At various points in the book, this emphasis has the effect of homogenizing different colonial contexts in uncomfortable ways, while it overlooks recent scholarship suggesting that Europe itself may have been more diverse in its tolerance of sexual dissidence than previously claimed. A similar homogenization characterizes Aldrich's understanding of the term "colonialism," which he presents almost as a structure static in form from the eighteenth century to the point of decolonization. Moreover, the extensive time period covered means that Aldrich is not always attentive to temporal shifts in attitudes both within the various colonies and at home.

For a study that claims to break new ground in surveying the relationship between homosexuality and imperialism—through its geographical focus, its broad sexual spectrum ("looking at homosexual sex per se, and at homoeroticism and homosociality" [7]), and its attention to "the 'native' partners and friends of European men" (8)—there are some remarkable absences here. First, Aldrich's book only presents male perspectives on homosexuality and empire. Because of the immensity of the task already undertaken, he might be excused for leaving lesbian relations out of his purview— although it is hard to argue that the discourses surrounding female homosex were not important to and in dialogue with those about men. He cannot be excused, however, for ignoring women's writing about male same-sex behaviors. Discussing Herman Melville's Typee (1846) and Charles Warren Stoddard's South-Sea Idyls (1873) but overlooking Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1924) is a telling example of this bias. It is as if Aldrich himself has adopted what he sees as the masculine "ethos of the colonial world" in its entirety—"with women excluded" (10).

The author's disinterest in women's views, moreover, extends to recent feminist scholarship about related fields of gender studies and imperialism. Nowhere is Antoinette Burton's influential work mentioned, nor are Philippa Levine's studies on the policing of prostitutes and venereal disease in Britain's colonies discussed. This is in part a disciplinary failing: Aldrich shows a much greater depth of knowledge of the French context than he does of the British one. Hence Christian Henriot's work on prostitution in Shanghai is referenced, where Burton's and Levine's is not. In effect, Aldrich's desire to go beyond scholarship on the British imperial experience is sometimes accomplished by ignoring the insights of that very scholarship. The same can be said of his claim to represent the voices of...