Imperial Leather

This text chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the recent struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power. It explores the sexualizing of terra incognita, the imperial myth of the empty land, the dirt fetish and civilizing mission, sexuality and labour, advertising and commodity racism, the Victorian invention of the idle woman, feminism and racial difference, and anti-apartheid culture in the current transformation of rational power. Using feminist, post-colonial, psychoanalytic and socialist theories, it argues that the categories of gender, race and class do not exist in isolation, but in intimate relation to one another. The book draws on diverse cultural forms - novels, diaries, oral histories, poetry and advertising.