Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire (review)

Despite the efflorescence of critically-engaged work in British imperial history (along with comparable work on other empires), there has been little cross-fertilization between postcolonial studies and whiteness studies within it. Perhaps the main reason for this is the dearth of historical scholarship on empires and colonialism that brings the insights of the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies to bear. Given the central role of British and other settlers within the British Empire from the seventeenth century onwards, and the large scale of settler migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the lack of application of theory from whiteness studies (a field that has developed substantially in recent years) has been surprising. For this reason even if there were no other, Radhika Mohanram’s new book Imperial White is to be welcomed. Mohanram, a scholar who brings together postcolonial studies, feminist theory and cultural studies, has explored the potential of applying insights from whiteness studies to various areas and episodes of British imperial history, and has produced several original interpretations that emphasize both embodiment and psychoanalytic categories.

The book is a collection of essays, some of which were previously published (including one article in this journal). This format of self-contained essays unified by thematic interests allows for a diverse range of topics. Mohanram succeeds in revealing the heterogeneity of whiteness, and especially its historical specificity—the ways in which it has been variously shaped by quite particular geographic, historical and cultural circumstances and racial hierarchies. Moreover, her focus moves around the empire, between and across colonies and the metropole. One of the great strengths of Mohanram’s work, to my mind, is her inclusion of the white-settler colonies in the same frame of analysis as the colonies of exploitation. In her first book Black Body: Women, Colonialism, Space Mohanram discussed feminism and racial politics in New Zealand, and raised fascinating questions about how feminist theory shifts as it moves between northern and southern hemispheres. Here, the colonial sites which compel her attention range from India, to Australia, and New Zealand.

An example of the originality and suggestiveness to be found in the book is the fifth chapter, on the emotional dimensions of settler history in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Based on several accounts by settlers, Mohanram posits that white settlers in nineteenth-century New Zealand experienced a great deal of mourning and melancholy—due to death, loss of their children, accidents, illness, mental breakdown, alcoholism, and the uncertainties of the settlement process. Settler melancholy became linked to guilt and denial about the deaths of Maori. These psychological and emotional dimensions were so imbricated in the process of settlement that there was “an illegitimacy at the heart of racial identity,” and melancholy became integral to whiteness in nineteenth-century New Zealand (123). Mohanram uses Freud to consider the role of mourning and melancholy in subject formation; and links the trope of cannibalism to the devouring of land by Pakeha (the term for white settlers in New Zealand), particularly in the context of the failure of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi to prevent the wars of the 1860s. She suggests that New Zealand identity is defined through loss: the loss of land for the Maori and the loss of home for the Pakeha, with “both groups caught in the web of denial of loss and incorporation of the Other” (138). Pakeha as a white-settler identity was “a melancholic formation” due to “loss of home and the cultural and bodily safety that the familiar conveys,” while Maori too became melancholic because of the loss of their land and their “lack of economic and social privileges” (138–9). White settler women, she suggests, had an even greater sense of loss and isolation and therefore degree of melancholy than settler men.

Chapter Six analyzes the interesting topic of the Irish in India, within a wider discussion of skin and modern racial taxonomies—again with reference to Freud. Mohanram approaches the topic of the Irish in India through a reading of Rudyard Kipling...