Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya (review)

Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya, by Carolyn Martin Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. ix + 250 pp. ISBN 0-8166-2525-5.

"Deconstruct through poetry" (24). This is one of the methodological caveats in Carolyn Martin Shaw's Colonial Inscriptions, which, in my opinion, is one of the most important works to emerge in recent African scholarship. Written with elegance, it does not shy away from theoretical sophistication. Concerned with texts that purport to a scientific rationality, it does not ignore their "poetry." Finally, passionate engaged with issues of race and particularly of gender, it does not reduce these to the tired binarisms that often beleaguer earlier modes of postcolonial criticism.

Shaw's work, of course, does not emerge in a vacuum. It owes much of its inspiration and methodological insights to Edward Said's Orientalism. But in many ways, by locating its analyses in Kenya, Shaw is able to provide a particularly Africanist (if not Kenyanist) spin on the cultural constructions of colonial landscape. In doing so, she begins to show that discourses on Africa in the colonial period were not as minimal as we sometimes think them to be. If, in an earlier period, Africa was, as Christopher Miller has suggested, a "blank darkness" to the European imagination, then such discourses rapidly shaped the colonial consciousness in the period of high colonialism. And as Shaw rightly suggests in her readings of Louis Leakey and Jomo Kenyatta, these discourses were not monolithic or univocal--they can be read as performative occasions articulating a particular political practice in the interest of advocating regional affiliations or national independence.

I am not saying, of course, that one will agree with everything in this book. While admiring its general orientation immensely, I find myself disagreeing with Shaw's reading of Kenyatta and particularly with her position that Kenyatta's work and politics (particularly vis-à-vis clitoridectomy) is negatively inscribed by Malinowskian functionalism. Whatever problems we may have with Kenyatta's politics, I don't think that we can blame them on anthropology. It is surprising that an otherwise nuanced analysis falls victim here to a general (post)colonial stereotype that always already attributes guilt and complicity to an entire disciplinary framework. Whatever happened in this instance to that very laudable methodological principle that Shaw espouses when she asks us to always ask, "How is it that the exact opposite from what is intended happens?"" (21). The answer to that question and my own take on Kenyatta will have to wait for another day, but I must hasten to note that my disagreement on this count will ultimately be only a minor quibble with what I consider to be an otherwise sympathetic and inspiring work.

Gaurav Desai

Gaurav Desai teaches in the English Department and is Co-Director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program at Tulane University (New Orleans).

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