Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock (review)

Reviews285 reader directly, drawing him or her comfortably in to the intricacies of the arguments. His opening lines illustrate this technique: "Ready now, reader? Easy then. That should put you the right historical frame of mind, put you in mind of the right historical frame. For it did seem easier then, certainly more relaxed. Like the addressed and otherwise rendered nineteenth-century reader who is my subject of study, you are invited to take it slow while we back our way into the last century" (3). Additionally, Stewart illuminates the pages with over twenty-five illustrations of "the reading event" — sketches, paintings, line drawings, photographs — most dating to the nineteenth century and all demonstrating various emotions, attitudes, postures, and surroundings of individuals engaged in the reading event. The visuals, Stewart's engaging tone, and over fifty pages of notes and index combine with the matter of Stewart's study to form a substantial, authoritative account of the conscripted reader in nineteenth-century British fiction. Readers and scholars of novels as well as theorists and historians will find Stewart's work a fascinating and enriching study. LESU J. FAVOR SuI Ross State University Rio Grande College Notes Forster, E.M. The Longest Journey. Viking. Stewart Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 19%. Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. ix + 449. $74.95 US (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Imperial Leather examines deployments of race, gender, and class in the discourses of modern imperialism, emphasizing that these three categories function not discretely, but interdependently, contingently, that they "come into existence in and through relations to each other" (5). Asserting that "no social category should remain invisible with respect to an analysis of empire" (9), the author goes on to delineate the decisive impact of imperial projects upon sociocultural conditions both in the colonies and in the European metropolis. Imperialism, for 286Victorian Review McClintock, marks the emergence of variable and contested constructions "of whiteness and blackness, masculinity and femininity, labor and class" (16) and is fundamental to the often troubled formations of Western identity and modernity. The book displays a varied assembly of critical topics. McClintock offers brief but perceptive treatments of works by Conrad, Kipling, and Haggard, the familiar — one may almost say unavoidable — subjects of colonial cultural studies. A lengthy, multifaceted examination of the relations and writings of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick elucidates the complexly interwoven thematics of race, class, and gender in the formation of metropolitan subjectivities and relational dynamics. Non-literary texts of culture — the great exhibitions, the Crystal Palace, the Victorian advertising image — also find their place as the argument proceeds through the visualization and domestication of empire and the imperial articulation of commodity "spectacle" and "fetishism." As is often the case with recent works of cultural studies, Imperial Leather includes numerous illustrations, but — more noteworthily — these image-texts are rarely left to hover in the glow of an unglossed, supposedly transparent meaningfulness; the author submits many of them to explicit articulate scrutiny. Imperial Leather's final chapters, which make up more than a third of its argument focus on South Africa. Extensively documenting South African social history, McClintock considers both the nation's local conditions and its place within British imperialism's global structure. She examines South Africa of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century in close relation with the life and writings of Olive Schreiner (the subject of a previous McClintock monograph), but carefully contextualizes literary and biographical analysis with historical input on such topics as mining colonialism (after the 1871 discovery of diamonds), the Boer struggles, structures of domesticity and labor, and the rise of the discourse of the "Hottentot." Her discussion of South Africa from the 1950s through to the present day addresses township culture, the Soweto uprisings, the formation of Black Consciousness, African and Afrikaner nationalism, using poetry and life-writing, emphasizing the importance of the crossrace women's collaboration Poppie Nongena, and duly noting the appearance of key literary magazines such as Drum and Staffrider. The value of the book, however, resides more in its synthesizing of scholarship than in its innovation...