The Intimate, the Familial, and the Local in Transnational Histories of Gender

Elizabeth Buettner. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. vi + 310 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-19-924907-5 (cl).

Philippa Levine, ed. Gender and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. vi + 306 pp. ISBN 0-19-924951-2 (cl).

Ann Laura Stoler. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ix + 335 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-23110-4 (cl); ISBN 0-520-23111-2 (pb).

The three works by Elizabeth Buettner, Philippa Levine, and Ann Laura Stoler represent somewhat different intellectual enterprises. Buetter's Empire Families is a monographic study of family life and practices in late British India that is based upon painstaking consultation of a vast array of sources. Levine's edited volume surveys critical problems in gender throughout the British empire from the eighteenth century on; its contributor list reads like an international Who's Who of leading scholars in that field. With the exception of the first chapter and epilogue, Stoler's Carnal Knowledge is principally a revisiting of her greatest hits. Despite differences, however, the publication of these and numerous other titles on intersections between gender and colonialism invites brief reflection upon the stages through which the relatively recent field (or fields) of women, gender, and colonial histories has passed as well as upon possible future trajectories. It should be made clear at the outset that I approach these works as well as the larger fund of scholarship that they represent from the dual perspective of someone trained primarily as a North African historian and secondarily as a scholar of the French Empire.

Roughly two decades ago, feminist historians began posing questions about how women experienced empire as well as how their actions, activities, and words produced critical shifts in the workings of colonial societies worldwide. Formulating big questions, feminist scholars reinvigorated what had become by then a rather marginalized, male-dominated scholarly enterprise. In 1986, Claudia Knapman's White Women in Fiji, 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? appeared, followed the next year by Helen Callaway's Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria, and in 1992, the essays edited by Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance.¹ This newly awakened interest in white women in overseas colonies had, in many cases, been inspired by slightly earlier area studies scholarship by those trained primarily in African, Asian, or Middle Eastern histories, languages, and cultures; the focus there was very much upon "indigenous" women—for example, Strobel's work on women of Mombasa.² The shift to European women began by initially contesting the notion that white women's permanent or temporary presence in overseas possessions triggered the loss of empire; these earlier studies were mainly devoted to women and empire (as opposed to gender and empire), and employed an ethnohistorical approach to plot out women's quotidian lives in diverse colonial settings. Attention to Western women's myriad activities as memsahibs, settlers, travelers, missionaries, or teachers—as resisters and challengers to, or mere accommodaters in, imperial hierarchies—forced or moved gender into imperial studies and, conversely, internationalized women and gender studies, previously somewhat Euro-American in focus.

As Jane Haggis and others noted at the time, the central issue of the relentless institutionalization of race, class, and violence, enshrined in colonial legal systems, was, at times, insufficiently theorized.³ Still, these works inspired a rapidly expanding corpus of research that made it possible to rethink binary constructs as well as the dominant core–periphery model of colonial encounters, and to comprehend that empire and nation were fashioned from intersecting, deeply gendered historical processes. Classic notions of unidirectional and univalent mère-patrie–colony relations were discarded for perspectives that probed the ambiguous, untidy, unstable, and contingent in reciprocal flows between colonial societies and metropoles—and...