Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges

In spite of its historic significance, gender considerations were often dismissed in traditional imperial histories. Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges presents a collection of readings which address myriad gendered dimensions of empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, across a wide range of geographic locales. Featuring contributions from more than a dozen international scholars and based on their original research articles revolve around such themes as labour, commodities, fashion, mobility, and activism while exploring the dynamics of empire in destinations ranging from Africa and the Americas to Europe and Asia. Special consideration is given to gender issues arising during periods when upheaval challenged colonial regimes, which often resulted in decolonization and independence. Chapters also reveal how former colonies transitioned into nations, along with transnational dynamics that took place among modern states. A common thread woven through each article is the matter of precisely who it was that deserved to be treated and recognized as fully human in an era of imperial exchanges and ongoing capitalist globalization. Innovative and thought–provoking, Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges sheds important new light on our understanding of the complex gendered dimensions of the exchanges of people, ideas, and cultural practices during the post–colonial era.

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges
Michele Mitchell and Naoko Shibusawa with Stephan F. Miescher

Part I: Labour

1 The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion: Eunuchs and Indirect Colonial Rule in Mid–Nineteenth–Century North India
Jessica Hinchy

2 Remaking Anglo–Indian Men: Agricultural Labour as Remedy in the British Empire, 1908 38
Jane McCabe

3 Robot Farmers and Cosmopolitan Workers: Technological Masculinity and Agricultural Development in the French Soudan (Mali), 1945 68
Laura Ann Twagira

Part II: Commodities

4 Pursuing Her Profits: Women in Jamaica, Atlantic Slavery and a Globalising Market, 1700 60
Christine Walker

5 Fashioning their Place: Dress and Global Imagination in Imperial Sudan
Marie Grace Brown

6 The Transnational Homophile Movement and the Development of Domesticity in Mexico City′s Homosexual Community, 1930 70
Víctor M. Macías–González

Part III: Fashioning Politics

7 Dressed for Success: Hegemonic Masculinity, Elite Men and Westernisation in Iran, c.1900 40
Sivan Balslev

8 It Gave Us Our Nationality : US Education, the Politics of Dress and Transnational Filipino Student Networks, 1901 45
Sarah Steinbock–Pratt

9 A Life of Make–Believe : Being Boy Scouts and Playing Indian in British Malaya (1910 42)
Jialin Christina Wu

10 The Tank Driver who Ran with Poodles: US Visions of Israeli Soldiers and the Cold War Liberal Consensus, 1958 79
Shaul Mitelpunkt

Part IV: Mobility and Activism

11 Marta Vergara, Popular–Front Pan–American Feminism and the Transnational Struggle for Working Women′s Rights in the 1930s
Katherine M. Marino

12 Guerrilla Ganja Gun Girls: Policing Black Revolutionaries from Notting Hill to Laventille
W. Chris Johnson

13 Gender and Visuality: Identification Photographs, Respectability and Personhood in Colonial Southern Africa in the 1920s and 1930s
Lorena Rizzo

Index

Stephan Miescher is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Making Men in Ghana (2005) and the co–editor of Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (2014), Africa After Gender? (2007) and Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (2003). He is also a former co–editor of Ghana Studies and co–director of the University of California Multicampus Research Group in African Studies.

Michele Mitchell is Associate Professor of History at New York University and former North American editor of Gender & History. She is the author of Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (2004), and co–editor of Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas (Blackwell, 2004).

Naoko Shibusawa is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University, where she teaches courses on US empire. She is the author of America s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (2006).