· Enumerate the major propositions made in the reading regarding the “gendering of imperialism:” the role of the feminine in Victorian colonial discourses.
· Discuss: “Perhaps one can go so far as to say that there should be no material history without psychoanalysis and no psychoanalysis without a material history.” (74)
· How much have you found out about each of the following themes that McClintock promises, at the beginning of the book to develop?
o First, she suggests that the colonial discourse is not only the discourse of domination but also of anxiety.
o Second, at the end of the 19th century, scientific racism changed to what to McClintock calls commodity racism: what she means is that while previously the discourse of racism was mainly a scientific discourse, it then began to be expressed primarily through the display of commodities.
o Third, commodities representing the colonies invaded, during the Victorian period, the middle-class home, while at the same time the colonized world was, in the Victorian imagination, domesticated.
o
Fourth, time was spatialized as a static,
nonivolving image of progress on the familial model: the family Tree of
· What are the ways in which McClintock redefines a) Freud’s biography and, relatedly b) Freud’s thought? In particular consider the roles of different women (mother, nurse, servant, lover) in middle-class men and women’s lives in the colonial period.
· What does McClintock contribute to the issue of gender and class?
· Situate the relationship between Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Culwick in the context of the above questions (and answers to them).
· Explain the relationships that hold among mimicry, abjection, and race.