Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa (review)

Zine Magubane's Bringing the Empire Home is an eloquent and innovative addition to the rich corpus of social history of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. In a complex interplay of relationships, the author seeks to demonstrate how ideas of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation were deeply implicated, foregrounding her evidentiary base in the economic relations of England and the Cape Colony of South Africa. Underlying her study is the fundamental question: what did concepts such as whiteness and blackness mean to colonized Africans? Her approach is to document, through an examination of various "texts," how categories of thought relating to race, gender, and class difference not only came to be constructed but also became incorporated into English political and social life; in short, how blackness functioned as a metaphor for marginality.

Following the introductory chapter, which is inspired considerably by Marxist and postmodernist theoreticians—particularly in the view that processes of signification and material production are deeply implicated—Magubane discusses (in chapter 2) how the colonized female body in the Cape became a locus for the intersection of capitalism and aesthetics, demonstrating that this was part of the process by which political economy was employed to separate the producer from his or her means of production. This is the process that the author terms the "transformation of commodification into sexuality." In chapter 3, Magubane turns to representations of colonized male bodies, and by linking the analysis to the English metropole, she illustrates how images of the colonized male provided metaphoric representations about the destitute in England. The middle chapters move the discussion from individual bodies to an examination of the concept of the "social body," describing the ways in which British working-class elites articulated their own social ills and political exclusion in racial discourses. A poignant illustration is the effect the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) had in shaping public and parliamentary discussion about the franchise and citizenship. In the final segment, Magubane "unmasks" the meaning of whiteness through reconstructions and rearticulations of blackness in South Africa and the African diaspora, illustrating how images of the African-American minstrel stage and gospel troupes, for example, reshaped conceptions of blackness.

Though the language is dense in places and the study utilizes an overarching construct, Magubane succeeds in producing an illuminating model for understanding the social construction of blackness and whiteness simultaneously in England and South Africa, underscoring the complex interconnection between the center and periphery. The human body, it seems, can be a vehicle for conceptualizing marginality in both locales. Equally important is the thread linking discourses of blackness and economics.

But Bringing the Empire Home does more than reveal the racialization of the English working class; it is also significant in unearthing subaltern voices in the colony, particularly in the ways African agency was deployed in renarrations of history so as to decenter, demythologize, and desacralize whiteness and thereby critique white supremacy. Although the author's heavy reliance on missionary accounts, newspaper articles, and travel writing in this form of analysis in nineteenth-century South African history breaks fresh ground, she could have shown more explicit recognition of the limitations of these same sources. However, even though theorizing that language is a site of power and domination, or that the boundary between the colony and metropole was never that impermeable, or that ideologies of race and blackness traveled back and forth along the metropole-periphery circuit are all not new—witness Paul Gilroy, Mary Poovey, and Edward Said, for example—Magubane takes South African social history to new heights. Bringing the Empire Home is not just thought provoking; it is in many ways creative and original.