Bodies in Contact

Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History

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Edited by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton

Duke University Press

Due/Published February 2005, 464 pages, paper

ISBN 0822334674

From portrayals of African women's bodies in early modern European travel accounts to the relation between celibacy and Indian nationalism to the fate of the Korean "comfort women" forced into prostitution by the occupying Japanese army during the Second World War, the essays collected in Bodies in Contact demonstrate how a focus on the body as a site of cultural encounter provides essential insights into world history. Together these essays reveal the "body as contact zone" as a powerful analytic rubric for interpreting the mechanisms and legacies of colonialism and illuminating how attention to gender alters understandings of world history. Rather than privileging the operations of the Foreign Office or gentlemanly capitalists, these historical studies render the home, the street, the school, the club, and the marketplace visible as sites of imperial ideologies. 

Bodies in Contact brings together important scholarship on colonial gender studies gathered from journals around the world. Breaking with approaches to world history as the history of "the West and the rest," the contributors offer a panoramic perspective. They examine aspects of imperial regimes including the Ottoman, Mughal, Soviet, British, Han, and Spanish, over a span of six hundred years--from the fifteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Discussing subjects as diverse as slavery and travel, ecclesiastical colonialism and military occupation, marriage and property, nationalism and football, immigration and temperance, Bodies in Contact puts women, gender, and sexuality at the center of the "master narratives" of imperialism and world history.

Contributors. Joseph S. Alter, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Elisa Camiscioli, Mary Ann Fay, Carter Vaughn Findley, Heidi Gengenbach, Shoshana Keller, Hyun Sook Kim, Mire Koikari, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Melani McAlister, Patrick McDevitt, Jennifer L. Morgan, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Rosalind O'Hanlon, Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez, Fiona Paisley, Adele Perry, Sean Quinlan, Mrinalini Sinha, Emma Jinhua Teng, Julia C. Wells

"Bodies in Contact is an excellent work, full of lively essays based on an engaging variety of historical perspectives. Instructors in world history rightly complain that there is little available to students that covers gender. This volume helps fill that gap with articles on important issues in the history of contact and empire."--Bonnie G. Smith, author of The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice

Contents

Acknowledgments -- Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton; Introduction: Bodies, Empires and World Histories

I. Thresholds of Modernity: Mapping Genders
Rosalind O'Hanlon; Masculinity and the Bangash Nawabs of Farrukhabad
Emma Jinhua Teng; An Island of Women: Gender in the Qing Travel Writing about Taiwan
Jennifer L. Morgan; Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1700
Rebecca Overmeyer-Velazquez; Christian Morality in Spain: The Nahua Woman in the Franciscan Imaginary
Julia C. Wells; Eva's Men: Gender and Power at the Cape of Good Hope
Sean Quinlan; Colonial Bodies, Hygiene, and Abolitionist Politics in the Eighteenth-Century France

II. Global Empires, Local Encounters
Mary Ann Fay; Women, Property, and Power in Eighteenth-Century Cairo
Adele Perry; Reproducing Colonialism in British Columbia, 1849-1871
Lucy Eldersveld Murphy; Native American and Metis Women as "Public Mothers" in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest
Mrinalini Sinha; Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere
Patrick F. McDevitt; Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity, and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884-1916
Elisa Camiscioli; Reproducing the "French Race": Immigration and Pronationalism in Early-Twentieth Century France
Fiona Paisley; Race Hysteria, Darwin 1938
Heidi Gengenbach; Tattooed Secrets: Women's History in Magude District, Southern Mozambique

III. The Mobility of Politics and the Politics of Mobility
Carter Vaughn Findley; An Ottoman Occidentalist in Europe: Ahmad Midhat Meets Madame Gulnar, 1889
Siobhan Lambert Hurley; Out of India: The Journey of the Begam of Bhopal, 1901-1930
Joseph S. Alter; Celibacy, Sexuality, and Nationalism in North India
Shoshana Keller; Women's Liberation and Islam in Soviet Uzbekistan, 1926-1941
Mire Koikari; Gender, Powers, and U.S. Imperialism: The Occupation of Japan, 1945-1952
Hyun Sook Kim; History and Memory: The "Comfort Women" Controversy
Melani McAllister; "One Black Allah": The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955-1970

Tony Ballantyne' and Antoinette Burton; Postscript: Bodies, Genders, Empires: Reimagining World Histories

Contributors
Index