ABSTRACT

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Postcolonialism and the Angel of Progress

part |186 pages

Empire of the Home

chapter |54 pages

The Lay of the Land

Genealogies of Imperialism

chapter |57 pages

“Massa” and Maids

Power and Desire in the Imperial Metropolis

chapter |49 pages

Imperial Leather

Race, Cross-Dressing and The Cult of Domesticity

chapter |23 pages

Psychoanalysis, Race and Female Fetishism

part |92 pages

Double Crossings

chapter |25 pages

Soft-Soaping Empire

Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising

chapter |26 pages

The White Family of Man

Colonial Discourse and the Reinvention of Patriarchy

chapter |38 pages

Olive Schreiner

The Limits of Colonial Feminism

part |94 pages

Dismantling the Master's House

chapter |30 pages

The Scandal of Hybridity

Black Women's Resistance and Narrative Ambiguity

chapter |23 pages

“Azikwelwa” (We will not Ride)

Cultural Resistance in the Desperate Decades

chapter |38 pages

No Longer in a Future Heaven

Nationalism, Gender and Race

chapter |6 pages

Postscript

The Angel of Progress