Women and the Colonial Gaze (review)

More accessible to a non-specialist audience than much of the writing in the field, this collection of essays on gender and imperialism is distinguished by its unusually broad, comparative scope and the refreshing clarity of the contributors’ prose. The fifteen essays explore the complex ways in which authors perceived women in diverse colonial settings, ranging from Roman Britain to twentieth-century Ethiopia, and the ways they represented gender in a variety of texts, including government documents, travel writing, and academic scholarship. The notion of “the ‘gaze,’ the lens through which the ‘Other’ is interpreted and subsequently depicted,” (3) unifies the volume, as the contributors trace the relationship between dominant Western cultural images marginalizing both women and colonized men.

The book’s focus on the privileged spectatorship of “the gaze” accommodates the empirical evidence upon which the articles are based. Most of the primary source authors analyzed are male, although exceptions appear in Nupur Chaudhuri’s piece on female Anglo-Indian travel writers and Carmen Ramos-Escandon’s chapter on Concepción Gimeno’s nineteenth-century view of the Aztecs. A number of the selections also seek to recover female voices through critical readings of official documents written by men. Examples include Ruth Wallis Herndon on Indian women in colonial Rhode Island and Karen Ray on women of the Indian diaspora.

The collection engages with many enduring concerns of scholars of imperialism and gender. Informed by Mary Louise Pratt’s influential idea of a “contact zone,” the book moves beyond binary categories of “colonizer” and “colonized” to conceive of colonialism broadly as a multifaceted, uneven process of inter-cultural interaction involving gender, ethnicity and class. Rather than breaking new ground theoretically, most of the articles provide additional empirical examples expanding our understanding of how colonialism was gendered. The book pays particular attention to such themes as how men and women experienced imperialism differently and how both colonial authorities and anti-colonial nationalists used women as symbols to support their goals. The collection deserves credit for its sensitivity to the inseparability of colony and metropolis, for example in Micheline Lessard’s piece on the French and Vietnamese women’s education. It also explores non-European colonialism in Jiweon Shin’s study of idealized Korean women and addresses masculinity, most notably in Luis Martínez-Fernández’s “The ‘Male City’ of Havana.”

While Tamara Hunt asserts accurately in her Introduction that “the concept of the ‘colonial’ is taken more broadly”(3) in this book than in most anthologies, the editors do not define colonialism, although several of the articles introduce intriguing concepts that provide scope for doing so. In her chapter “Wild Irish Women,” Hunt suggests that this population was “doubly colonized” (62) by virtue of their gender and their ethnicity. While her sensitive analysis of the Ladies’ Land League is one of the few in the book to explore women’s resistance to colonialism, one wishes that Hunt had discussed her terminology further, perhaps using it as a starting point for a more nuanced definition of colonialism. Lacking more of an explicit theoretical framework, the phrase “doubly colonized” implies the existence of an inflexible colonial hierarchy and risks devaluing the experiences of women who would likely resist the characterization of their ethnicity as a burden.

The most innovative idea in the volume, and one which offers the most scope for a broader definition of colonialism, is Katherine Fleming’s concept of “simulated colonialism” (39) or “surrogate colonialism” (42) which she presents in a compelling analysis of eighteenth-century attitudes toward Greece. Her chapter “Greece in Chains: Philhellenism to the Rescue of a Damsel in Distress” argues that western Europeans, especially the British, colonized the history and cultural legacy of classical Greece by imagining the country as an oppressed, heroic female in need of rescue by chivalrous males from contemporary degradation. Fleming’s analysis invites readers to expand their idea of what constitutes colonialism by presenting an unexpected case in which male...