The Politics of Race, Nation, Empire, and the Intimate: Recent Explorations

Ranging over substantial topographies of time and place, these four books offer significant insights by some twenty scholars of the intellectual terrain shaped principally by professor of history and anthropology Ann Laura Stoler in her seminal works Race and the Education of Desire, “Tense and Tender Ties” and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.¹ All the works are of importance, clearly demonstrating the richness and complexity of recent studies in the broadly defined field of empire and gender. Elisa Camiscioli and Margaret Jacobs delve into the fraught history and politics of state interventions into the intimate bonds of sex and family while the Tony Ballantyne and Antoniette Burton edited collection, Moving Subjects, contains fifteen essays that illustrate the influence and utility of Stoler’s ideas in their own narratives of far-flung empire. Fiona Paisley, author of Glamour in the Pacific and also appearing in Moving Subjects, is concerned with revealing the inner-workings of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association in the three decades from 1928 to 1958, uncovering a narrative of women’s political activism and the politics of race, the turbulence of war and the rebuilding of international associations, and their continued endeavors to project a “women’s voice” in the new world order from 1945.

Camiscioli’s Reproducing Empire offers a very rewarding and pithy illumination of race and sex and the anxieties they produced in the French Third Republic (1870–1940). It is an impressive work, centering on the French predicament after World War One of vastly depleted manpower reserves and potential mates for legions of French women. Camiscioli demonstrates how concerns about labor and economics combined with those of intimacy, creating a rich and revealing archive generated by a range of government officials, jurists, and intellectuals. They fretted over the perils of immigration into the French nation and deployment of French men and women out into the empire, and beyond. Camiscioli uncovers a dimension of the wider field of twentieth-century race and immigration history that has been dominated by attention to immigrant nations like the United States, Canada, and Australia in this time period. These histories have explored the seemingly interminable anxieties about race, cross-racial sexual contacts, national identity, and security in these nations. The central focus of this body of scholarship has been anxieties directed at external non-Europeans, like potential Asian immigrants, or non-Europeans minorities, particularly indigenous peoples, within national borders (as Jacobs’s work will demonstrate). Here Camiscioli shows how similar fears deeply impacted this old world, imperial nation long before contemporary French struggles with religious and cultural diversity at home. This book gives longevity and intellectual breadth and depth to acute contemporary debates about the French nation and its jealously-guarded identity.

In essence Camiscioli’s work is about politics and bodies—human, intellectual, and political—after a “mortal hole” was inflicted upon the French nation and its economy following the crisis of World War One. Camiscioli shows how the large-scale importation of foreign workers into France precipitated a series of dilemmas, debates, and polemics in the years after the armistice (68). This circumstance tested racial ideas in all levels of French society—from bedrooms and factory floors to high office—reformulating and entrenching pre-existing racial hierarchies. Camiscioli tracks which foreign men—Spaniards, Belgians, Portuguese, Italians...