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  • Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia by Deana Heath
  • Lisa Sigel
Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia. By Deana Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. 238. $95.00 (cloth).

Purifying Empire provides a comparative examination of obscenity regulation in Britain, Australia, and India. As the first work to chart out the ways that obscenity policies worked in these three contexts, this book deserves praise for the breadth of its vision and for its willingness to tackle multiple state organizations and papers simultaneously. Heath has developed an ambitious project that seeks to see the curtailment of obscenity not only as a state project but as a colonial project that organizes materials according to racial and political aims that work on multiple registers. Hers is a valuable attempt to put obscenity in a framework larger than the nation and broader than the mechanics of laws and policies, which are often so obscure that to detail them means to lose sight of their implications. Heath also brings the fullest discussion of the Foucauldian conception of governmentality to the area of obscenity to date.

The introduction lays out the main contributions of the work in a scant seven pages: these include looking at print culture as a form of commodity, looking at the regulation of obscenity as it shifted from a national into an imperial project, and looking at obscenity as part of the broader project of “imperial hygiene.” The first chapter provides the foundations needed to make sense of the larger theoretical aims, including an overview of how Foucault’s ideas of governmentality played out in two distinct colonial contexts. Because Foucault’s ideas of governmentality and biopolitics were spread across lectures and texts rather than consolidated into a central work, Heath’s gloss on the topic is especially welcome, as is her discussion of the ways that previous scholars have used concepts related to governmentality in colonial and postcolonial projects. Chapters 2 and 3 examine obscenity in Britain first as a national project and then as an imperial project. These two chapters provide a useful review of the history of British obscenity organizations, policies, and practices.

In chapters 4 and 5, Heath examines the mechanics of print circulation and print censorship in Australia and British India. Here, Heath delineates the interchange between British and colonial print circulation patterns and considers the ways that circulation of ideas that spoke about sexuality—both in the obscenity and in the regulation of obscenity—allowed for the production of governmentality. In these two chapters, her findings stand out.

Heath demonstrates that the Australian example applied the ideas of “white Australia” to the control of obscenity as a border issue. The conception of obscenity as contagion allowed for the development of censorship as a sanitary system. Heath states: “The phenomenal system [End Page 489] of literary regulation developed by the Commonwealth customs (in conjunction with the post and police), a system designed specifically to regulate imported rather than indigenous publications, reveals that for the customs erecting a cordon sanitaire around Australia to keep out undesirable print matter was an essential component of the administration of the White Australia policy, and was vital to protect Australia from contaminates—including from its imperial metropole—as was its quarantine system to keep out impure bodies” (128).

Through the comparison of Australia to British India, Heath shows the ways that the state considered codes and materials in relationship to populations. While Australia practiced exclusion, the British colonial state largely refused to censor because of the ways that the Hicklin standard demanded the consideration of texts relative to people. The Hicklin standard did not establish a universal definition of indecency but instead considered whether materials could deprave and corrupt in relation to the populace. The application of this standard across the subcontinent meant that the continuous reappraisal of the innate capacity for corruption in people was set against textual circulation. As a result, incursions into obscenity were rare and undertaken by Indian elites rather than the British as long as the materials did not realistically depict sexuality, describe practices that could...

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