| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Antoinette Burton, editor. Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. (Routledge Research on Gender and History, number 2.) New York: Routledge. 1999. Pp. xiii, 232. $55.00.

Modernity is an elusive concept, and it is this elusiveness that animates Antoinette Burton's excellent anthology of new work on gender, sexuality, and empire. Taking its colonial vocabulary from Mary Louise Pratt and Ann Laura Stoler and its gender cues from Joan W. Scott and Judith Butler, the book never resolves what colonial modernities may be or why such a rubric abets gender analysis. Yet San Francisco's Chinatown and Niagara Falls tourism vie for space alongside Hong Kong, Canada, Ceylon, India, and Marseilles. Indeed, a good part of what dazzles here is the spatial range, the insistence on interconnected spaces and the mobility of persons and discourses among these contact zones. While British imperial politics are predominant, the book includes the racial and gender politics of French, Dutch, American, Canadian, and Australian colonialisms. Africa, quite interestingly, is present only through Marseilles. 1

Many themes that we have come to expect for gender, empire, and sexuality studies—domesticity, hygiene, degeneration, motherhood, and venereal disease—are present, as are the reformist campaigns of white colonial women. Thus, we find Anglo-Australian women campaigning to end Aborigine child removal (Fiona Paisley); contagious disease legislation in Hong Kong and the Straits (Philippa Levine); and home science education in interwar British India (Mary Hancock). Yet this is not just more of the same. The essays presented disrupt our expectations about location, reorder tired thematics, and draw attention to the complex entanglements between emerging indigenous feminisms and local nationalisms. Hancock even gives a gender critique of the concept of public culture. . . .

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