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

So much has been written about the cultural history of the British Empire in the nineteenth century that it is hard to think that anything new remains to be said. Magubane's Bringing the Empire Home struggles mightily with what is now a rich corpus of academic writing. The author is interested in three major issues and their complex interrelations: the making of race, the dialectics of class and culture, and gender and the construction of various social bodies. Magubane is committed to understanding both the making of whiteness and blackness. Equally important, Magubane has grounded her research in Britain and in South Africa, with a considerable evidentiary base from which to ground her arguments.

In keeping with the rest of the literature, Bringing the Empire Home is primarily interested in how categories of thought come to be constructed socially and naturalized. She argues that the nineteenth century marked a pivotal era of cultural invention and normalization, an assertion that is unlikely to surprise many. Her methodology is to focus on discursive formations and publics. Magubane begins with an analysis of how political economists understood the transition to capitalism. She is especially interested in the crucial silences that emerge from their texts, particularly the silencing of women and the creation of the "economic" and the "political" as separate spheres. Magubane then shifts the analysis to colonialism and blackness but brings the discussion back to the metropole and the racialization of the English male working class. She is, in effect, arguing for the importance of center and periphery as a single field of social and historical analysis.

The second third of the book moves from an analysis of discourse to an examination of the constitution of various publics in England and in South Africa. Again, in thinking about the Empire contrapuntally, Magubane examines the location of the Empire domestically, particularly the appropriations of the Anglo–Boer War by various groups within England. Finally, and most interestingly, Bringing the Empire Home returns squarely to South Africa and discusses the social construction of whiteness among the colonized. Magubane ends, appropriately enough, with the Black Atlantic and the ways in which South Africans constructed ideas of blackness that contested dominant discourses.

Magubane covers much ground between the covers of one book. Bringing the Empire Home usefully pulls together a wide-ranging collection of material. The book suggests the importance of moving toward a more complicated understanding of the production and circulation of subaltern discourses and texts within the Empire. Theoretically, however, Bringing the Empire Home is not especially successful. Too often it is not clear just who is speaking, Magubane or one of the many theorists that she constantly invokes. Those who have read authors like Gilroy, Poovey (who certainly is not simply an "economic historian"), Said, and others are unlikely to come away from Bringing the Empire Home with much that is new.¹