FETISHISM AND INDIGENISM
IN ANNE MCCLINTOCK’S IMPERIAL LEATHER
R
By Alison Kooistra
ANT 426H1F
Instructor’s Comments:
This is an outstanding review. What I liked about it is that 1) It is
structured by the reviewer’s views rather than by the book’s contents, 2) it
makes a clear statement on what the book is about, 3) it makes a clear
statement of the book’s qualities and shortcomings, 4) it is rich in detail but
not too long, 5) the references are highly relevant and well researched. The review received an A+.
ABSTRACT
Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather
employs a triangulated analysis of race, gender, and class to interrogate
Victorian imperial culture, both in
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INTRODUCTION
The evidence for Anne McClintock’s revolutionary redefinition of fetishism
inundates my email account on a daily basis. Imperial Leather, a brilliant, sprawling work, explores fetishism as
a hinge linking the mutually constitutive intersections between race, class,
gender, sexuality, and imperialism in 19th century
Such fetishes
compulsively return to my inbox, each embodying a contemporary irresolvable “crisis
in social meaning” around issues of gender, race, class, and nationality. The
quotes given above represent a select sample of my daily spam inundation. The dominatrix
fetish drawn on by the pornographic website and its complement, the submissive
wife fetish appealed to by the mail-order bride agency, reveal the crises of
feminism and the gendered reorganization of the family. They further reproduce
Orientalist discourse on ethnicity and race; the women and men pictured in the pornographic
image are all white, whereas the advertised brides – despite the fact that they
are European – are described as the opposite of “the Western women we are all
so sick and tired of.”
The breast and
penis enlargement formulas are indicative of the contemporary crisis in the way
we perceive and experience our bodies (Martin 543). In our late capitalist
culture, the body is becoming a fragmented, specialized entity (Martin 544),
under pressure to fit an ideal form that has become the normative standard
(Bordo 339). The incessant repetition of the word “natural” in both
advertisements reveals the contradictory idea that “normal” can only be
achieved through the use of certain products. The impossibility of perfection,
coupled with the postmodern “paradigm of plasticity” (Bordo 336), which insists
that perfection is equally attainable by all members of society (regardless of
race, gender, or class), together create an irresolvable contradiction that
manifests itself in body-part fetishism.
Finally,
McClintock would find the fat-eliminating soap advertisement particularly
interesting. She theorizes soap as one of the quintessential Victorian fetishes
of racial hygiene and imperial progress, demonstrating that the mission civilatrice, the cult of
domesticity, and the growing entrenchment of bourgeois culture were
concentrated in the multivalent signifier of soap (208-209, 211). Washing is a
form of purification ritual that can “prepare the body as a terrain of meaning,
organizing flows of value across the self and the community and demarcating
boundaries between one community and another” (226). Today, thinness is a
marker of personal and professional success; in this advertisement, soap is re-fetishized
as a means of attaining these social heights. The caption indicates a kind of
Orientalist “counter-discourse,” which presents
OVERVIEW OF THE THEMES
AND THEORIES IN IMPERIAL LEATHER
Imperial Leather explores a variety
of fetishistic behaviours and objects, including soap, fruit salts, colonial
maps, female labourers, and the Boer covered wagons in the Tweede Trek nationalist spectacle. The diversity of reviews testify
to the tremendous scope and complexity of this book, which has been critiqued
from within the fields of anthropology (Nelson), history (Hall; O’Donnell;
Pickering; Strange), geography (McEwan), sexuality (Jolly), feminism (Lewis), Victorian
studies (Baucom), British studies (White), and African studies (Ha). Imperial Leather makes significant
contributions to all of these disciplines.
The book is
divided into three parts, framed by an Introduction and a Postscript. The
Introduction gives a brief overview of McClintock’s main themes and theoretical
considerations, while the Postscript theorizes the current fetish for the word
“post” as a crisis in ideologies of the future. The first part, “Empire of the
Home,” examines the diverse manifestations of colonial discourse in Victorian
Britain. McClintock reveals that “as domestic space became racialized, colonial
space became domesticated” (36). The lower classes, particularly female
labourers and prostitutes, were classified as a separate race, while
discussions and depictions of colonized peoples feminized them. Further, the
differences between upper class Europeans and the variety of “others” they
defined themselves against were effected primarily through differences in
domestic organization.
McClintock is at
her most compelling and most complex in Part 1. Her psychoanalysis of Freud and
her revision of his theories provide fascinating insights. McClintock disrupts
Freud’s family love triangle of father, mother, and son, revealing the repressed
presence of the powerful nursemaid and, by extension, other participants in the
historical, changing multiplicity of domestic economies. She also demonstrates
the existence of female fetishism and revindicates the powerful connections
that can exist between mother and daughter as well as father and son. McClintock
applies these insights in her case study analysis of the cross-class
relationship between Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. McClintock traces Munby’s
“babyist” fetish and obsession with the spectacle of rough female labourers “in
their dirt” back to his desire for his nursemaid. Cullwick’s desire to display
her physical prowess at household chores and cross-dress as different
characters is traced to her need to reclaim the value, not only of her own
work, but also her mother’s as well.
In Part 2, “Double
Crossings,” McClintock explores the meanings of metropolis versus the colony
for the British people and the commodities that moved between the two. In
chapter 5, she examines the Victorian fetishism with domestic commodities, and
soap in particular. Detailing various advertising campaigns, McClintock shows
how scientific racism became translated into “commodity racism” (209). In
chapters 6 and 7, she psychoanalyzes the work and lives of Henry Rider Haggard
and Olive Schreiner within the historical context of changing gender relations
and family composition.
Part 3,
“Dismantling the Master’s House,” explores the constructions of white
nationalism and the diverse manifestations of black resistance to apartheid in
20th century
McClintock also
provides interesting new insights here into the theorization of nationalism, exploring
Benedict Anderson’s famous concept of an “imagined community.” Pointing out
that for most of the history of nationalism the majority of people have been
illiterate, McClintock challenges
Imperial Leather is an engaging, insightful book of remarkable scope
and depth. Difficult theoretical concepts are explored in accessible prose and
concrete examples; delightful anecdotes from popular culture are rendered
fascinatingly dense with complex meanings. McClintock demonstrates that the
categories of class, gender, and race are mutually constitutive and cannot be
imagined separately. She explores this triangulated discourse through the
organizing trope of the fetish to great effect. Her work is organized by a hermeneutics
of “situated psychoanalysis,” which she defines as “a culturally contextualized
psychoanalysis that is simultaneously a psychoanalytically informed history”
(72). This doubled theoretical foundation, showing the necessary
interconnections among ideologies, fetishisms, economic organization, and
material conditions, provides many fascinating insights into Victorian imperial
culture and – to a lesser extent – 20th century black South African
resistance strategies.
CRITICISMS OF IMPERIAL LEATHER
Many critics of Imperial Leather
mention its disjointed quality (Baucom 491; Jolly 447; McEwan 492; Nelson 385;
O’Donnell 312; Pickering 991).[1]
Most explain this as a by-product of the book’s genesis as a series of
separately published articles, but this is only a partial explanation. The
chapters are tightly cohesive up until to Part 3, when the focus shifts from
the colonizers to the colonized. It is here that the tightly interwoven strands
of race, class, gender, sexuality, and imperialism begin to unravel. In her
exploration of the authorial hybridity of The
Long Journey of Poppie Nongena (chapter 8), sexuality is ignored; in her
analysis of the book’s critical reception, race is inadequately problematized.
In her discussion of black South African cultural resistance (chapter 9),
gender and sexuality are not introduced as critical categories at all. Chapter
10 and the Postscript once again are coherently integrated with the first two
parts of the book.
As Lorraine
O’Donnell points out in her review of Imperial
Leather, the reluctance of the African National Congress (ANC) to
incorporate women’s issues is mentioned, but not explored in any detail (312). In
the same chapter, McClintock neglects to introduce gender as a critical category
in her overview of the work of mid-20th century black South African
writers. The executive organization and publishing practices of Drum, “the first magazine for black
writing in English” (332), are similarly spared a gendered analysis.
THE ABSENCE OF FETISHISM
IN THE COLONIES
It is sexuality, however, that is the most consistently ignored in Part 3.
McClintock shows a strange reluctance to psychoanalyze the texts of Lauretta
Ngcobo and Oswald Mtshali in the way that she relentlessly and insightfully
dissects the works of Henry Rider Haggard and Olive Schreiner (Jolly 447). Luise
White notes that “[i]t follows from [McClintock’s] work that whiteness, not
unlike walking sticks or spectacle-frames, was as much ridiculed as admired,
that the whiteness opened up a space of revulsion and desire every bit as much
as blackness did in the imperial world” (484). That this implication is never
explicitly problematized is somewhat confusing and rather disappointing, given
McClintock’s exhaustive critique of the meanings of race in the British
metropolis.
This oversight is
all the more glaring in the context of McClintock’s discussion of Frantz Fanon.
She cites Fanon’s writing on “colonial desire” purely to construct an argument
on the implicitly gendered nature of his work. She demonstrates that Fanon’s
use of the word “man” is not a universalized identity that includes both
genders (as Homi Bhabha asserts), but rather denotes a heterosexual male
identity. Her argument is persuasive and important. However, in focusing on
this aspect alone, she fails to interrogate Fanon’s fetish for whiteness in the
same way that she interrogates Munby’s fetish for blackness.
Elements of Fanon’s
discourse reveal a rich semiotic field of inquiry:
When my restless
hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and
make them mine (362).
Frustratingly,
McClintock leaves the fetishistic implications of this statement unexplored. It
is as though McClintock is reluctant to engage in a kind of “imperial intellectualism,”[2]
refusing to “mine” colonized people for their innermost secrets. Indeed, an
explicit part of the project of Imperial
Leather is to problematize the construction of whiteness (8) and to turn racist
colonial stereotypes back upon their source. McClintock is at pains to
demonstrate that “far from being a quintessentially African propensity, faith
in fetishism was a faith fundamental to imperial capitalism itself” (223).
McClintock’s focus
on South African cultural resistance is presented more polemically than the rest
of the book in order to valorize the literary merits of non-European
traditions. Reina Lewis, noting McClintock’s “clear commitment to political
change” and insistence on “bring[ing] home the ‘real life’ implications of each
example” (149), may provide a clue to McClintock’s differential treatment of colonized
and colonizer: perhaps, in the interests of social justice, McClintock is
attempting to promote rather than critique anti-imperialist movements.
This possible
explanation is borne out by Ian Baucom’s critique of McClintock on a similar
issue. Baucom demonstrates that
McClintock’s discussion of the implicitly universalized South African reception
of The Long Journey of Poppie Nongena
is in fact an audience of white, liberal intellectuals (492). For example, he
cites McClintock’s claim that “in
McClintock’s
recognition of the uncompleted work of liberation in
Aijaz Ahmad, in
another context, has criticized the reluctance to subject colonized societies
to a triangulated analysis of race, class, and gender. Ahmad identifies this
tendency as a variety of Orientalist counter-discourse that he calls
“indigenism” (296). Indigenism restricts cultural analysis to the formative
processes of imperialism alone, thus essentializing the dichotomy of colonizer
and colonized and constructing certain societal groups and social practices as
more “authentic” than others (296). McClintock explicitly critiques the tendency
in postcolonial theory to present “the” colonizer and “the” colonized as
unified, binary opposites (14-15). She recognizes, with Ahmad, the need to
disrupt this dichotomy by introducing the critical categories of gender and
class.
However, in her
discussion of black South African 20th century literature, these
critical categories are lost, with the unfortunate and assuredly unintentional
result that certain voices become privileged as more authentic than others. According
to both Baucom (492) and Diane M. Nelson (385), McClintock implies that the
Sophiatown generation of poets, with their love of classical British literature
and formal conservatism, are less authentic than the Soweto generation of
poets, who draw on a tradition of oral culture to disrupt canonical English
conventions of style and subject matter. It is important to note with Baucom,
however, that this is a “hinted suggestion” rather than an explicitly constructed
argument (492). The clearest expression of this problematic undertone is the
concluding paragraph of chapter 9:
Forcing poetry and
criticism to step outside the magic circle of immanent value, into history and
politics where criteria of judgement remain perpetually to be resolved, black
poets of the 1980s were no longer content to snatch impudent rides on the dangerous
trains of white tradition. Instead they increasingly expressed a collective
refusal to ride at all until the trains are theirs… (351).
This formulation
recalls the model of linear progress that McClintock is at pains to deconstruct
throughout Imperial Leather; here,
the old guard of the Sophiatown mimic men is replaced by the more authentically
indigenous
COLONIAL MIMICRY
AND FETISHISM
McClintock’s description of the Sophiatown writers makes abundantly clear that
they are mimics, in Bhabha’s sense of the term. Mimics are the colonized elite:
the intellectuals, teachers, interpreters, soldiers, and bureaucrats who find
themselves caught between two different cultural systems, unable to fully
assimilate to either (McClintock 62-63). The Sophiatown intellectuals, “[b]orn
of black parents but schooled and salaried by the English, steeped in white
culture but barred at the door, …often knowing Shakespeare but not the language
of their people, in love with the township but identifying with the world of
the mind” (333), able to establish friendships with white intellectuals but never
fully as equals, fit Bhabha’s definition precisely.
Yet, although
McClintock promises to explore the nuances of mimicry throughout the book (65),
she does not explore the implications of this theory nor even mention the term
itself in her discussion of the Sophiatown poets. This omission is particularly
odd given her astute identification of the contradictions in Bhabha’s theory,
which posits the ambivalence of mimicry as inherently subversive in one
article, and in another, claims that it will never upset the dominant imperial
power structure (McClintock 64).
McClintock
identifies the need for a theory of the distinctions between anticolonial
mimicry and colonial mimicry (64). The ambivalent position of the Sophiatown
writers would have made a fascinating case study for the elaboration of these
differences. While Sophiatown poetry frequently subscribed to canonical English
literary standards and values, the writers saw themselves as creating a new
form English, one that was intended for a black rather than a white audience
(332). What elements of their work and their lives were subversive of the
dominant power structure? Which were supportive?
McClintock’s
critique of Bhabha also chastises him for neglecting gender in his theory of
mimicry. Ironically, in her discussion of the Sophiatown poets, McClintock not
only ignores the clear associations of mimicry, but also ignores the critical
category of gender. Further, as with Fanon, McClintock fails to theorize the
potentially rich links between mimicry and fetishism. The question of whether
mimicry may be a form of indigenous fetishism – both similar to and different
from Cullwick’s cross-dressing as a dark-skinned male slave – is a critical
oversight. This is especially frustrating for the reader, since this line of
analysis would have been more connected to McClintock’s main themes than the
actual content of the chapter, which is a literary and social valorization of
the challenge
What makes this omission
even more confounding is that McClintock implicitly acknowledges the question
of indigenous forms of fetishism in her initial revisionist formulation of the
phenomenon. When listing the structural characteristics of fetishism in chapter
3, McClintock notes that these features are “not necessarily universal” (185). This
tantalizingly incomplete suggestion begs the question of what the differences
might be between Victorian, white middle class fetishism and 20th
century South African black intellectual fetishism.
Thus, in the two
chapters devoted to the self-representations of a colonized group, McClintock
abandons her theoretical model of historically-situated psychoanalysis, and
inconsistently applies three of her main tools of analysis: race, gender, and
sexuality. These absences may potentially be understood in part as an issue of formal
constraints. The endeavour would be highly complex and problematic: as
McClintock rightly points out, there is no unified “colonized” identity, nor is
there a unified “colonizer” identity to oppose it (14-15). Nevertheless, she adroitly
deals with this problem in the first part of the text by examining the
microcosms of Cullwick and Munby’s relationship or the text of Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, in relation to her
triangulated discourse on colonial fetishisms. Similar tactics could be used in
the third part of the book to interrogate, for example, Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die or the history of black
South Africans’ incorporation and revalorization of Pears soap.
The absence of
fetish analysis among the colonized subjects is a significant omission: the
fetish “stands at the crossroads of psychoanalysis and social history” (184)
and thus links together the two theoretical foundations of McClintock’s
analysis. The various fetishes explored in this text also provide the concrete
embodiment of McClintock’s many categories of analysis (race, gender, class,
sexuality, colonialism). The fetish’s absence in chapters 8 and 9 is the main
contributing factor to the reader’s impression of disconnection in Imperial Leather.
THE EXPORTATION OF
CULTURE AND INDIGENOUS RESPONSES
In addition to her failure to provide a situated psychoanalysis of black South
African cultural producers, McClintock further neglects to discuss black South African
responses to European products and white South African writers. McClintock’s fascinating
discussion of the reception of The Long
Journey of Poppie Nongena is limited only to the white South African
critical response. A campaign of “white nationalist hygiene” (303) insisted
that Poppie Nongena was apolitical. It
seems impossible that, of the “well over a hundred reviews, articles, letters
and reports [that] debated, discussed and analyzed” (301) the 1981 book, none
were written by black South Africans. The question of whether Poppie Nongena was viewed as apolitical
by the black community is oddly left unasked.
Cheryl McEwan notes
a similar oversight in McClintock’s discussion of Olive Schreiner, the 19th
century British South African writer and political activist. Although
McClintock thoroughly dissects the racial limits of Schreiner’s feminist
theories and the negatively stereotyped African characters in her novels,
“there is no mention of the reception of her work by black Africans, and the ways
in which Schreiner’s attitudes may have been influenced by black political
activism” (492).
In her discussion
of commodity spectacle in chapter 5, McClintock traces the advertising history
of Pears soap and other domestic products. In these ads, household items became
agents of imperial progress, bringing civilization to awestruck savages. Looking
at a group of Sudanese “dervishes” bowing low before the inscription “PEARS
SOAP IS THE BEST,” one cannot help but wonder first, how indigenous peoples
really reacted to European commodities, and second, to what extent these
peoples were exposed to these advertising campaigns. Neither one of these
questions is treated in any depth.
McClintock’s
analysis of the multivalent meanings of soap and other household commodities in
Victorian culture is insightful; however, she neglects to explore the new significances
that these items took on in the colonized countries to which they were
imported. At the end of the chapter, McClintock does provide three anecdotes
reported by colonial merchants of natives who failed to be impressed by
European trinkets. These are accompanied by a brief list of resistance
strategies – “mimicry, appropriation, revaluation and violence” (229) – to European
cultural impositions. However, this superficial analysis provides no critical
exploration of the meanings and uses of these commodities, nor the processes of
their incorporation into indigenous societies.
Luise White asks,
as McClintock does not, “what happens to imperial power when the colonized use
Bovril as foot powder and believe that Pears soap increases male potency?”
(483). Do these reinterpretations represent a process of indigenous
re-fetishization? And if so, what sorts of irresolvable contradictions were
occurring in the cultures that developed these new meanings?
THEORETICAL
IMPLICATIONS
These omissions have
consequences for McClintock’s theories. She asserts that the colonial powers
“violently and decisively foreclosed” the meanings of the commodity fetishes
they brought “by successfully imposing their economic and cultural system on
others” (226). This statement is dangerously close to recalling Lacan and
Freud’s denials of female fetishism; in their formulations, women could “be the
objects of fetishism but never the subjects [italics McClintock’s]” (193). Here, colonized peoples’ interpretations of
European commodities are denied, as is their ability to develop their own
fetishistic agencies of desire. While McClintock’s point about devastatingly
unequal power relations is well taken, her assertion of the total foreclosure
of meaning seems unfounded given her lack of engagement with the indigenous
reception of European commodities. As White puts it, the colonizers “might be
able to legislate who was white, but they could never control the meanings of
whiteness or aspirations thereto: Africans used margarine as skin cream as
beauty and respectability and commodity culture were inserted into African
epistemologies” (483).
Finally, if
commodity spectacle worked to foster a coherent “imagined community” among
illiterate British citizens, did it work to foster a sense of exclusion among colonized
peoples abroad in the empire? To what extent were indigenous peoples exposed to
the racist advertisements for the products they were being given or sold? What,
for example, would have been the reactions of people who saw the image of a
white child washing off the black skin of another child? Would these images,
perhaps disseminated on the products’ packaging, have influenced the ways in which
these commodities were absorbed and interpreted?
Bhabha argues that
interpretations of stereotyped images must engage with “the repertoire of
positions of power and resistance, domination and dependence that constructs [the]
colonial identification subject (both colonizer and colonized)” (67). Otherwise,
the analysis risks restricting itself to a simple “ready recognition of images
as positive or negative” (67). McClintock achieves a marvellously nuanced analysis
of “the repertoire of positions of power” in her discussion of 19th
century
CONCLUSION
These lacunae are disappointing,
not only because McClintock’s theories promise a full exploration of indigenous
perspectives, but also because her insights into the perspectives of
REFERENCES CITED
Ahmad, Aijaz.
“Between Orientalism and Historicism.” In Orientalism:
A Reader. Ed. Alexander Lyon Macfie.
Baucom, Ian. Rev.
of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne McClintock. Victorian Studies 40.3 (1997): 491-493.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture.
Bordo, Susan. “‘Material Girl’: The Effacements
of Postmodern Culture.” In The Gender and
Sexuality Reader. Eds. Roger
Ha, Marie-Paule. Rev. of Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne
McClintock. Research in African
Literature 28.2 (1997): 187-190.
Jolly, Margaret.
Rev. of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender,
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne McClintock. Journal of the History of Sexuality 7.3
(1997): 444-448.
Lewis, Reina. Rev. of Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne
McClintock. Feminist Review 55
(1997): 148-149.
Martin, Emily.
“The End of the Body?” In The Gender and
Sexuality Reader. Eds. Roger
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.
McEwan, Cheryl.
“Gender, culture and imperialism.” Rev. of Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne
McClintock. Journal of Historical
Geography 22.4 (1996): 489-494.
Nelson, Diane M.
“‘The Horror’: The Subject of Desire in Postcolonial Studies.” Rev. of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne McClintock. American Anthropologist 99.2 (1997): 383-386.
O’Donnell,
Pickering,
Michael. Rev. of Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne McClintock. Journal of Social History 30.4 (1997):
991-993.
Puri, Shalini. Rev.
of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne McClintock. Signs 23.2 (1998): 532.
Strange, Carolyn.
Rev. of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender,
and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne McClintock. Canadian Historical Review 78.1 (1997):
175-177.
White, Luise.
“Sex, Soap, and Colonial Studies.” Rev. of Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, by Anne
McClintock. Journal of British Studies
38.4 (1999): 478-486.
[1] In contrast, Shalini Puri
praises Imperial Leather as
“impressive in its consistent theorization of gender in relation to other axes
of power” (532). However, Puri does not elaborate on
this statement or provide any corroborating evidence for this view.
[2] O’Donnell employs this term somewhat facetiously to describe
McClintock’s mining of different disciplines (e.g., feminism, psychology,
materialist history, literary criticism, etc.) and extrapolation of “what she
feels is their most precious treasures” (310). O’Donnell later recants this
claim by noting that McClintock’s nuanced approach “prevents the book itself
from participating in empire-building” (312). I in turn am mining the rich
concept of imperial intellectualism for what I feel is relevant here, and
excluding O’Donnell’s glib application of the term.