In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Anne McClintock breaks interdisciplinary boundaries between psychoanalysis and social history in order to dissect the imperial motivations and actions of the British Empire and other imperial powers vying for control of colonized lands and peoples. Building upon the historical work of intellectuals such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, she simultaneously challenges their perspectives by presenting the ways imperialism is fundamentally gendered and by bringing forth rich evidence of anti-imperial agency. Her introduction and postscript bracket her book with a skepticism of the “post” in postcolonialism (and many other “post” words) as well as the imperial notion of progress. By examining a wealth of diverse materials – from advertisements and paintings, to letters, biographies, poetry, and novels – McClintock poses a series of provocative and meticulously researched claims on deep and complicated intersections between gender, race, and class in the construction of a unified (White) Family of Man. Imperial authorities of Victorian Britain projected onto colonized people, women, and the working classes an atavistic existence in a prehistoric, anachronistic time by engaging ideologies of singular, evolutionary space-time, namely the Family of Man and the Map of Mankind. In evoking empty spaces or “virgin” lands where they did not exist, colonials recreated a myth of discovery, ritualistically naming, mapping, and inventing originary narratives, in the process revealing imperial and nationalistic fetishes that betray a doubled, ambivalent state of paranoia and megalomania. This author will suggest that McClintock’s observations of colonial erasure and rewriting of histories are recurring and readily apparent in both the imperial and anti-imperial forces within South Africa, supporting her position that colonialism is not a relic of the past.
McClintock introduces this concept through the example of imperial map-making, an exercise in keeping anxieties of thresholds and “new” lands at bay and birthing an entitled male colonial entity in ways reminiscent of baptism, thereby accomplishing a gendered disavowal of prior histories to the land. Maps, and the naming practices they entail, are the first of imperial fetishes that McClintock will go on to describe, fetishes that serve to help colonials “negotiate the perils of margins and thresholds in a world of terrifying ambiguities.”[1] “By flamboyantly naming ‘new’ lands, male imperials mark them as their own, guaranteeing thereby, or so they believe, a privileged relation to origins – in the embarrassing absence of other guarantees.”[2] To compensate for the presence of people already populating these lands, colonized people and women (whether European or colonized) were projected into anachronistic time as atavistic, less evolved, child-like beings. “The colonial journey is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space, but backwards in racial and gender time, to a prehistoric zone of linguistic, racial and gender degeneration.”[3] Colonized people are found (with the support of anthropometrics and social Darwinism) to be lower on the evolutionary tree, the apogee of which is a European man and the nadir of which is a Black woman. McClintock demonstrates that such a construction of both a Family of Man and a Map of Mankind with a singular, linear history is a construction that depends on elision of history and a baptism-like birth of a male European rational nation. “The axis of time… was projected onto the axis of space and history became global.”[4] It was precisely the concept of Family of Man that allowed for imperial narratives of “degeneration” and “progress” to take root.
Similar dynamics can be read in McClintock’s thought-provoking analysis of Joubert’s publication of The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena. In a pattern McClintock observes in South Africa more broadly, white writers at times attempted to “borrow the authenticity of black writers to compensate for their own dwindling legitimacy.”[5] In what can be read as another grasp at “discovery,” Elsa Joubert, a white Afrikaans writer, collected the oral histories of “Poppie Nongena,” a black South African woman, and her relatives. It is important to examine the naming behavior surrounding the book’s publication. “Poppie Nongena” is a pseudonym occluding the true identity of the joint author (putatively for her own safety) and the woman whose life history is splayed in the pages of the book. Yet even her pseudonym is not used to name her as the book’s author or co-author.[6] Instead, as McClintock carefully reminds her readers, Elsa Joubert is published as the sole author of Nongena’s story. Joubert effectively erases Nongena’s claim to her own history and in a naming ritual indicative of Edward Said’s poignant observation of authorship as reflecting mastery,[7] Joubert births herself as the owner of a story that would have remained in oblivion (like spaces marked with cannibals on maps to indicate territories unknown to colonials) without her intervention. The megalomania, or what McClintock calls “white arrogance,” continues.[8] Joubert claims authorship of the “facts” and “stark truth” of Nongena’s life, as though reigning supreme over the rational, objective realities.[9]
If one can observe fetishism in Joubert’s authorship of Nongena’s story, so too can readers recognize fetishism in the autobiographical form, especially as conceptualized by Georges Gusdorf. Gusdorf considered autobiography emerging from a self-consciousness found only in “the European race.”[10] The irony here is that as Gusdorf ascribes to European peoples a greater awareness of self, he engages without awareness in the recurring imperial fetish of defining self in opposition to others. He defines himself not through self-reflection and self-consciousness, embodied by a mirror, but in constructed opposition to “primitives.”[11] Furthermore, Gusdorf’s claim that autobiography (and, as McClintock notes, its “ideology of possessive individualism”) does not exist outside of the West is again ascribing blankness onto other parts of the world with pre-existing forms of autobiography.[12] These are recurrent disavowals that are doubled: on the one hand, a disavowal by European colonizers of their own fetishes, including the fetish of the mirror, and their projections of anxieties, paranoia, and megalomania on other cultures, and on the other hand, a disavowal of the cultural complexities and histories of colonized peoples.
This ironic absence of self-awareness – in fact a systemic, political disavowal – among the putatively rational and evolved colonials is cleverly evoked in Frankie Ntsu kaDitshego/Dube’s poem titled “The Ghettoes” where he writes:
Those who claim to be non-smokers are wrong
The place is polluted with smoke from
Chimneys
Trucks
Hippos
Gun-excited camouflage
dagga-smokers
and burning tyres
Non-smokers are smokers too![13]
His poem points to colonial hypocrisy, or what McClintock may call “ambivalence.” In metaphorically addressing the apolitical stance as in fact political, he draws attention to colonial strategy of claiming hegemonic and normative status for itself while identifying others, namely the colonized, as peculiar, less evolved, and the object of definition by imperial authorities. In an anti-imperial agentic response, Ntsu kaDitshego/Dube redefines what constitutes the figurative “smoker,” effectively disavowing the colonial disavowal.[14]
McClintock covers much ground in Imperial Leather, importantly pointing to the elision of history in the construction of a Map of Mankind and the scientific racism that gave way to commodity racism (through spectacle). She offers examples of anti-imperial agency and complicates narratives that primarily underscore male agency with little acknowledgment of women’s agentic actions (relegated to footnotes or apologetically stated as out of the scope of humanity).[15] Not only does McClintock usefully trace the career of the term “fetish” back to its connotations of superstitious religions and sexual perversion (while proposing her own understanding of the term, instead), she also grounds fetishes in their historical contexts. By demonstrating the ways in which fetishism has been projected by imperial forces on the colonized just as they are disavowed in their own rational ranks, McClintock points to ambivalence, paranoia, and megalomania that shaped much of imperial actions. Importantly, nationalisms continue to be expressed through fetishistic spectacles today, enacted through treks that reinvent histories, gendered displays of nationalistic fervor, and visible display of monuments and other “impassioned objects.”[16] Tracing these spectacles historically and understanding their underlying incentives is crucial to recognizing colonialism in its contemporary manifestations and doing justice for those still occupied.
Bibliography
Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” In James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Joubert, Elsa. The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena. London: Coronet, 1981.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Ntsu kaDitshego/Dube, Frankie. “The Ghettoes.” Staffrider, July/August 1979.
[1] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 28.
[2] McClintock, 29.
[3] McClintock, 369.
[4] McClintock, 359.
[5] McClintock, 305.
[6] Even the use of a pseudonym is suspect, as, given the monetary resources from the book’s publication, it is hard to imagine that Nongena had not secured for herself a more socially and economically secure life. Regardless of this speculation the fact of the singular imperial author remains. The elision of the true originary entity from authorship harks back to the erasure of indigenous histories and the myth of discovery promulgated by colonials appearing at thresholds.
[7] McClintock, 300.
[8] McClintock, 308.
[9] Elsa Joubert, The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (London: Coronet, 1981), Preface, quoted in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 307.
[10] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 313.
[11] Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 29, quoted in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 313.
[12] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 313.
[13] Frankie Ntsu kaDitshego/Dube, “The Ghettoes,” Staffrider (July/August, 1979), 36, quoted in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 349.
[14] The logic of the apolitical stance itself being a political act is reminiscent of the soap fetish McClintock discusses in Chapter 4 of Imperial Leather. Sold and represented in commodity spectacle to African colonies as a symbol of progressive rationality and scientific, hygienic progress, the soap itself served as a fetish while the British Empire saw itself as entirely beyond fetishism.
[15] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 363. This is McClintock’s indictment of Homi Bhabha’s exclusion of women among humanity in his introduction to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. “Apparently, the question of the woman of color falls beyond the question of human difference, and Bhabha is content simply to ‘note the importance of the problem’ and leave it at that.”
[16] McClintock, 375.
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