Book Review

Methods/Theory

This is a lively and interesting book that will attract readers from a variety of fields concerned with the history of gender. The able introduction by Ruth Roach Pierson runs through the major developments in the histories of women, imperialism (interpreted by editors Pierson and Nupur Chaudhuri in its widest sense), and nationalism and situates the subsequent essays effectively for novice readers. For scholars familiar with studies in feminist and postcolonial historiography, the introduction reminds one why such work is still so necessary. The range of case studies offered requires most to read outside their areas of specialization: few scholars are expert in the histories of colonization, anti-imperialism, and nationalism specific to Iran, Japan, India, Canada, Ireland, and France—to name just a few of the territories covered by contributors. Those concerned with the ways that gender intersects with discourses of race, ethnicity, nation, and class will find much to interest them in the different examples discussed. An enquiring engagement with feminist historiography permeates the book, which originated in a conference of the International Federation for Research in Women's History. I was surprised to find several writers still positioning themselves against an earlier moment in imperial and women's historiography in which women travellers and pioneers were deemed to be outside the evils of racism and imperialism, but perhaps what passes for orthodoxy in cultural studies is still a very vibrant opposition viewpoint in some fields of history. All the contributors to this volume are specifically concerned with how discourses of nation are gendered and with how gender identities are racialized. The value of the book lies in the contrasts among different case studies, whose cumulative evidence of the endlessly variable interplay of gender and imperialism effectively steers the reader away from constructing any unifying narrative of gender, imperial, or postcolonial experience and identity.

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