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Book Review
| Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History. Edited by TONY BALLANTYNE and ANTOINETTE BURTON. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. 464 pp. $89.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
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Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, edited by Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, is a significant and erudite addition to the thriving field of global history. Let me make it very clear at the outset that my use of the expression "addition" does not carry any of the pejorative connotations often associated with the word. For this book is very far from being merely another additive collection of essays. It is an important pedagogical resource—in fact the editors have self-consciously pitched it as such. Furthermore, it marks a critical intervention in the constitution of the fields of global history and empire studies, respectively. |
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The editors make it clear in their introduction that the book has three goals, each of which (or sometimes all of them) marks the essays that make up the collection. The first is to bring together a series of articles that come under the rubric of world history. The discrete essays that make up the volume allow the reader to "take a global view of ostensibly local events, systems, and cultures and to reevaluate the histories of connection and rupture that have left their mark, in turn, on our contemporary condition." Second, the abiding theme of the book is a history of empire, which is "loosely" defined as "webs of trade, knowledge, migration, military power, and political intervention that allowed certain communities to assert their influence and sovereignty over other groups." Finally, the book is about bodies. To this reader it is this last, much more than the other two, that gives the collection its uniqueness and integrity in a field otherwise marked by considerable academic creativity but a noticeable barrenness when it comes to astute analyses of gender, sexuality, and the embodied subject. |
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