Arondekar (1996) the Problem of Strategy- How to Read Race, Gender, And Class in the Colonial...

7/30/2019 Arondekar (1996) the Problem of Strategy- How to Read Race, Gender, And Class in the Colonial Context

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Arondekar 1996 (Postmodern Culutre)

The Problem of Strategy: How to Read Race, Gender, andClass in the Colonial Context

Anne McClintock, Imper ial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuali ty in the

Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.Strategy works through a persistent (de)constructive

critique of the theoretical. "Strategy" is an embattled

concept-metaphor and unlike "theory," its antecedents

are not disinterested and universal. "Usually, an

artifice or trick designed to outwit or surprise the

enemy"(Oxford English Dictionary)

-- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,

Outside in the Teaching

Machine

One of the founding assumptions of this book is that

no social category exists in privileged isolation; each

comes into being in social relation to other categories,

if in uneven and contradictory ways. But power is seldom

adjudicated evenly -- different social situations are

overdetermined for race, for gender, for class, or for

each in turn. I believe however that it can be safely

said that no social category should remain invisible

with respect to an analysis of empire.

-- Anne McClintock, Imperial

Leather

1. In a recent interview, ironically entitled "In a Word," Gayatri ChakravortySpivak revisits the term "strategy," and argues for the use of precise critical

"strategies" in academic scholarship. As the quotation above indicates, her

notion of "strategy" strives for a political accountability, for a situated reading

that prioritizes a local context that by definition cannot function as a blanket

"theory" that is then applied to all like-sounding cases. "A strategy suits asituation," she reminds us, "a strategy is not theory." While Spivak's work on

"strategic essentialisms" is well known, and often misunderstood as an excuse

to proselytize on the virtue of academic "essentialisms," her particular

articulation of the critical necessity of the notion of "strategy" itself has often

been overlooked.


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2. I begin my review of Anne McClintock'sImperial Leather: Race, Genderand Sexuality in the Colonial Contestwith an invocation of Spivak's notion of

"strategic" readings to situate McClintock as one such admirably engaged and

embattled "strategic" reader. McClintock's collection of essays wrestles with

situating and balancing the problematic variables of race, class, and gender in

readings of the colonial context within a range of hermeneutical discourses.While it is critical commonplace in current academic parlance to speak of the

imbricated discourses of race, class, and gender, McClintock calls for a critical

reading of empire that demands a rigorous re-conceptualization and

historicization of such utterances. Race, gender, and class, she argues, are to be

called "articulated categories" that "are not distinct realms of experience,

existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they simply be yoked

together retrospectively. Rather they come into existence in and through

relation to each other, if in contradictory and conflictual ways." (5) These

categories thus do not derive their signification from a fixed point of origin, but

instead are "articulated," unfolded from uneven and often opposing locations.

Operating within such a methodological framework, McClintock's book offers

three related critiques of "the project of imperialism, the cult of domesticity and

the invention of industrial progress"(4). Each critique points up the tendency in

earlier critical work to overemphasize one term of the articulation at the

expense of the others. For instance, McClintock demonstrates how the cult of

domesticity in late nineteenth-century England has as much invested in

hierarchies of race as it does in traditional taxonomies of gender. Or that

imperialism has as much to do with gender asymmetries (both within and

without the colonial context) as it does with the more pronounced impositionsof class and race.

3. McClintock's heuristic gestures reflect the same kind of constant structuralscrutiny that she brings to bear on the analytical categories of race, class, and

gender. One of her preliminary moves is to locate herself firmly at the juncture

of a range of traditionally separate theoretical schools:4. An abiding concern of the book is to refuse the5. clinical separation of psychoanalysis and6. history . . . and to rethink the circulation of7. notions that can be observed between the family,8. sexuality and fantasy (the traditional realm of9. psychoanalysis) and the categories of labor,10. market and money (the traditional realm of

political and economic history) (8).

McClintock similarly refuses to conceive of time and history as a binary of

before and after, with the post-colonial condition comfortably cushioned from

an oppressive colonial past; she points instead to the urgent continuity of

historical patterns. The plotting of time and histories, she argues, is nothing

more than "a geography of social power" (37).


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11. In this essay, I will pursue the limits of McClintock's claim for such criticalpractices insofar as they can be traced in her book, and in turn pose a series of

questions: First, given the scattered, albeit connected, chronologies of the

book's individual essays (which begin with Rider Haggard's sketch map of the

Route to King Solomon's mines, and end with a more contemporary map of

South African politics), does McClintock manage to achieve the kind of precisehistorical and theoretical intervention she herself calls for? Second, is the scale

of McClintock's project simply too ambitious, too wide-ranging, too

methodologically fragmented to produce readings that are coherent and

"strategic?"Imperial Leather's table of contents reads like a model for a

cultural studies collection, with sections on a dizzying array of issues from an

essay on race, cross-dressing, and the cult of domesticity, to another on

commodity racism and imperial advertising. Does McClintock, in her effort not

to privilege one category over another as an organizing trope for her analysis of

different cultural pheonomena, end up with a more radical version of the

"commonplace, liberal pluralism" that she so abhors (8)? Third, how does

McClintock's book add to the current scholarship on the structures of colonial

discourse? The past few years have seen a prolific and rich widening of

critiques in the area of colonial discourse analysis. Christopher Lane's The

Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual

Desire, Ali Behdad'sBelated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial

Dissolution, Ann Stoler'sRace and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History

of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, and David Spurr'sRhetoric of

Empire are just some examples of the diverse cultural-studies based critiques of

empire that have recently emerged. Does McClintock offer us something thatwe won't already find elsewhere in this rapidly emergent field?

12. The first, and most persuasive section of McClintock's book is entitled"Empire of the Home." This section attempts to situate genealogies of

imperialism within the European domestic landscape, and specifically within

the cult of domesticity. "Discoveries" of the colonies appear as belated gestures

where the "inaugural scene is never in fact inaugural or originary: something

has always gone before" (28). And that "something [that] has gone before,"

McClintock argues, is something that is staged internally within the bedrooms

and boardrooms of the European metropole. McClintock expands the notion of

domesticity to include "both a space (a geographical and architecturalalignment) and a social relation to power" (34). Using material examples of

commodity racism such as a 1899 Pears Soap advertisement, she demonstrates

how discourses of scientific racism and commodity fetishism conflate in scenes

of marketable "imperial domesticity." The Pears' image "shows an admiral

decked in pure imperial white, washing his hands in his cabin as his steamship

crosses the threshold into the realm of empire" (32). Access to imperial spaces


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is arrived at through the cleansing powers of a domestic product that

significantly promulgates a version of imperial domesticity that

is withoutwomen. Colonialism may well be metaphorised as the benevolent

expansion of the English family and its accompanying domestic habits, yet it is

a family that is structurally inflexible and exclusively male.

13. McClintock's most successful location of the convergence of racist, classist,and sexist structures in the production of late nineteenth-century bourgeois

English domesticity lies in her analysis of the infamous Arthur Munby/Hannah

Cullwick affair. Arthur Munby, a well-known Victorian barrister (1829-1910),

was discovered, posthumously, to have "loved Hannah Cullwick , "servant born

at Shifnal," for forty-six years, and for thirty-six of those years to have secretly

harbored Cullwick as his "most dear and beloved wife and servant" (76).

McClintock not only points to the myriad connections between work and

sexuality that found this "particularly Victorian, and particularly neurotic"

relationship (77), but further demonstrates how this dynamic is artfully

managed through a Victorian order of things that relies on learned and

interconnected discourses of race, class, and gender. Munby's urban projects

and elaborate typologies of working-class women collide, McClintock reminds

us, with the distinctly "imperial genre" of travel ethnographies: "Like the

colonial map, Munby's notations [and photographs] offered a discourse of the

surface and belonged -- like the musuem and exhibition hall -- to the industrial

archive of the spectacle" (82). Working-class women, like the racialized

'natives' dotting the imperial landscape, become subject to, and object of a

similar masculinist order of colonial logic. And the genre of Munby's

photograph, as Malek Alloula's Colonial Harem has also stridently articulatedin a related context, is the imperial site/sight of choice.

14. Unlike earlier readings of the affair that cast Cullwick as the beleagueredlower-class victim of an oppressive master, McClintock however chooses to

emphasize the couple's shared investment in the maintenance of this S/M

dynamic. Throughout the various roles Cullwick adopts for her master's

pleasure (from servant to mistress, from class to race transvestism), she stages,

for McClintock, not merely her master's fantasies, but also her own. The

couple's desires can converge because and not despite of their articulated class

and gender positions. And the site at which they do indeed converge most

markedly is in their mutual fetishization of race. Munby, in stride with thediscourses of Victorian degeneration, imagines Cullwick, not just as

transgressively "male" but also as "black." At her most desirable (for Munby,

that is), Cullwick is presented "in a grotesque caricature of the stigmata of

racial degeneration: her forehead is flattened and foreshortened" (107).

Cullwick, too, stages her most effective rebellion against Munby's authority

when she refuses to relinquish control of a "slave-band" that marks her as


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racialized, even as she is performing other roles. In a radical re-writing of

Freud and theories of fetishism, McClintock grants Cullwick, the woman, the

ability to fetishize. The filthy leather "slave-band" as fetish stands in not for the

phallus, but for the concealed/missing component of Cullwick's/womens' labor.

15. I find McClintock's fusing of psychoanalytical categories of the fetish withcategories of race and class persuasive but also problematic. WhileMcClintock's careful placement of Munby and Cullwick within a dense history

of Freudian disavowal and displacement of early objects of desire (such as the

elusive and yet everpresent maid-figure) is compelling, I am less struck by her

reading of race in such an analysis. McClintock does not fully problematize

Cullwick's and her own conflation of slavery with gender and class oppression.

Such conflations have been vehemently opposed by many African American

feminist critics, such as Carla Peterson and Hortense Spillers, who argue that to

make such analogies in experiences is to elide the very specificities and

brutalities of the history of slavery. Herein lies the main challenge to

McClintock's heuristic battles: her continued appeal to the analogical as well as

to the intensely different structures of analysis within the categories she is

exploring. In other words, race is to class as class is to gender, and so on and so

forth. Within such analogs, race can only approximate gender, never stand in or

substitute for it. Yet, to argue, as she does, that race, class, and gender

participate in mutually generative relationships is to erase the binary structures

of the analogy, and to arrive at problematical dialectical moments such as the

one cited between slavery and gender oppression. I am not suggesting that there

is an easy way out of this quandary, but merely that McClintock appears to

have overlooked such potential pitifalls in an otherwise dense argument.16. McClintock's second large section, entitled "Double Crossings," moves ourgaze from the domestic body of Cullwick's performances to the larger

domestication of the market of empire. In this instance, the history of English

soap production and advertisement functions as an allegory for the

whitewashing of empire. Imperial advertisements for different brands of soap

invoke images of the monkey (Monkey Brand Soap), or of an evolutionary

racism, to sell not just commodities but a particular version of positivist

history: "Civilization is born [such images imply] at the moment of first contact

with the Western commodity" (223). Commodities in their crossings to the

colonies suggest the possibility of a different brand of colonial mimcry. Thenative is not encouraged to aspire to the public status of an Englishman, but

only to adopt his private habits and accoutrements; to buy, but never to

participate in the trading of such commodities. The poetics of colonial

cleanliness become "a poetics of social discipline" (226). But as McClintock's

prior section has already demonstrated, such boundaries and fantasies of

colonial control are rarely maintained. Myths of native idleness, lassitude and


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filth are crucial to the reification of such commodity exchanges, myths that,

McClintock points out, are easily dismantled through close historical readings

of the particular colonial labor context. Fetishism appears disruptively here,

too, as in the case of Hannah Cullwick, manifested in the uncanny quality of

commodity exchange processes, especially as they involve indigenous practices

and products. Colonial feminists, like Olive Schreiner, further interrupt thehegemony of Western commodity discourse through their focii on gendered

and racialized forms of production.

17. Again, as in my critique of the earlier section, I will argue that McClintockfalters in her analysis of the category of race. Race, as is refracted through the

multiple images of soap advertisements in this section, does not transcend its

traditional binary of black and white. McClintock restricts her analysis to the

African continent, ignoring the similarly powerful reverberations such

racialized commodities had on other colonies, such as India. Extending her

critique to India, or even gesturing toward its perverse racial position (India

begins to be read in heavily racialized terms only after the rebellion of 1857)

would permit McClintock to interrogate conflicting discourses of race in

simultaneous moments of colonial history. Similarly, I would add that just as

units of analysis like race and gender have their particularized locations in

history, so also do discourses of critical inquiry. If we are urged to localize the

fetish, we must concurrently localize the post-colonial theory that McClintock

uses in its precise political and historical moment. While McClintock expends

considerable effort in explicating and situating psychoanalyis and Freud within

a distinct genealogy of theoretical negotiations, she is less prone to do so with

regard to post-colonial theory and its practitioners such as Homi Bhabha.18. McClintock's final section, "Dismantling the Master's House," provides acontemporary and powerful closure to her first two sections. Using the political

struggles of men and women in South Africa, this section explores the crucial

thread of historical continuity, exposing the disruptive kernel of colonial

oppression that contaminates any neat division of the colonial past from the

putatively post-colonial present. The theoretical purchase of terms such as

hybridity takes on a markedly political valence in contexts such as South

Africa, where narrative ambiguities perform tasks that few politicians can

accomplish. McClintock uses the example of a collaborative literary

text,Poppie Nongena, produced through the labor of a white and a blackwoman, as one site of hybrid resistance. Elsa Joubert, a white Afrikaans writer

and mother, transcribes in this text the orally transmitted history of a black

woman, "Poppie Nongena" recorded during the bloody Soweto uprising of

1967.

19. I will end as I began with a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. In aninterview republished in The Post-Colonial Critic, Spivak compares the project


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of sustained critical inquiry to the daily cleaning or brushing of one's teeth.

Both, she argues, need to be undertaken in the spirit of daily maintenance, and

unlike a surgical operation, should not be expected to bring about a drastic

recovery or change. McClintock's book asks for a similar critical vigilance in

our analysis of the categories of race, class, and gender. Thus, even if at times

McClintock's text appears maddeningly repetitive and heavily over-burdenedwith disparate topics, it is her commitment to constant rereadings of empire that

we most remember. The post-script to her book, "The Angel of Progress" sums

up this gesture and warns us against the dangers of critical lethargy:20. Without a renewed will to intervene in the unacceptable,21. we face the prospect of being becalmed in a historically22. empty space in which our sole direction is found by23. gazing back spellbound at the epoch behind us, in a24. perpetual present marked only as

"post." (396)

Department of EnglishUniversity of Pennsylvania

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mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

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