Gender, culture and imperialism

Recent years have witnessed a small avalanche of critical historical work on British imperial culture across the social sciences and not least within geography. The inspiration behind the critical interest in empire, knowledge and power was undoubtedly Edward Said’s groundbreaking and provocative Orientalism. Waves of debate have permeated throughout the social sciences and humanities in response to Said’s exposé of the imperialist discourse of Orientalism. One of the major bodies of criticism has been written by feminist scholars, who argue that the critics of Orientalism and ethnocentric scholarship continue to write out gender. In particular, criticism has been levelled at the lack of recognition of the imperial context as being implicitly and explicitly gendered, and of the varying roles of European women as agents of imperialism. In addition, many of these interventions are informed by, and constitutive of, feminist debates within what is now broadly referred to as postcolonialism. Much of this work has produced more nuanced readings of imperial culture, which explore the interweavings of race and class as well as gender within European imperialism. Several of these texts also account for strategies of resistance to hegemonic imperial power, both within the colonies and the imperial powers themselves. It is within this context of a continuing engagement by feminist scholars with the production of imperialist knowledges and, more specifically, with more nuanced readings of imperial culture that these two books are situated. Both Imperial Leather and Gendering Orientalism focus upon the production and consumption of aspects of imperial culture; however, the scope and approach of the two books is rather different. The latter is probably more closely related to Said’s original project, but rather than focusing exclusively on women as the subjects of Orientalism, Lewis intervenes in debates about the female gaze and explores the ways in which European women were also the producers of Orientalism. Gendering Orientalism focuses on the role of white women as cultural agents using two specific case studies; firstly, it explores women’s contribution to visual Orientalism using the work of French artist Henriette Browne; secondly, it resituates the work of George Eliot in relation to imperial discourse by focusing on Orientalist depictions of Jews as other in Daniel Deronda. The focus is not merely upon the production of Orientalist images, but also on their reception by the British and French critical press (closely related, therefore, to the Foucauldian approach adopted by Sara Mills) and it provides some extremely