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

Anjali Arondekar

Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
arondeka@dept.english.upenn.edu

 

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality 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

 

In a recent interview, ironically entitled “In a Word,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 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 a situation,” 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.

 

I begin my review of Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest with 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 impositions of class and race.

 

McClintock’s heuristic gestures reflect the same kind of constant structural scrutiny 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:

 

An abiding concern of the book is to refuse the clinical separation of psychoanalysis and history . . . and to rethink the circulation of notions that can be observed between the family, sexuality and fantasy (the traditional realm of psychoanalysis) and the categories of labor, 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).

 

In this essay, I will pursue the limits of McClintock’s claim for such critical practices 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 precise historical 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’s Belated Travellers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution, Ann Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, and David Spurr’s Rhetoric of Empire are just some examples of the diverse cultural-studies based critiques of empire that have recently emerged. Does McClintock offer us something that we won’t already find elsewhere in this rapidly emergent field?

 

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 architectural alignment) 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 is arrived at through the cleansing powers of a domestic product that significantly promulgates a version of imperial domesticity that is without women. 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.

 

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 articulated in a related context, is the imperial site/sight of choice.

 

Unlike earlier readings of the affair that cast Cullwick as the beleaguered lower-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 the discourses 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 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.

 

I find McClintock’s fusing of psychoanalytical categories of the fetish with categories of race and class persuasive but also problematic. While McClintock’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.

 

McClintock’s second large section, entitled “Double Crossings,” moves our gaze 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. The native 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 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 the hegemony of Western commodity discourse through their focii on gendered and racialized forms of production.

 

Again, as in my critique of the earlier section, I will argue that McClintock falters 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.

 

McClintock’s final section, “Dismantling the Master’s House,” provides a contemporary 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 black woman, 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.

 

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

 

Without a renewed will to intervene in the unacceptable, we face the prospect of being becalmed in a historically empty space in which our sole direction is found by gazing back spellbound at the epoch behind us, in a perpetual present marked only as “post.” (396)