532 I Book Reviews

Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,Culture, and Race. By Robert J. C. Young. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. ImperialLeather: Race, Gender,and Sexualityin the ColonialContest. By Anne McClintock. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

PostcolonialRepresentations: Women, Literature, Identity. By Francoise Lion- net. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Shalini Puri, University of Pittsburgh

nder the rubricof (post)colonial studies, these books address issues of race, sexuality, and Empire from different perspectives: Robert Young emphasizes Victorian scientific discourses of racialhybridity, FranSoise Lionnet investigates literary critical discourses of cultural hybridity, and Anne McClintock brings together feminist cultural history and psycho- analysis to study constructions of domesticity. Young's ColonialDesire provides a thorough genealogy of the term hy- bridity, tracing its elaboration in various Victorian discourses of race and miscegenation, including Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau's The In- equalityofHuman Races,Matthew Arnold's CultureandAnarchy, Bryan Ed- wards'sHistory, Civil and Commercial,ofthe British Colonies in the WestIndies, and S. G. Morton's CraniaAegyptica.The question of the fertility of racial hybrids was crucial to Victorian theories of polygenism and monogenism: "The claim that humans were one or several species (and thus equal or unequal, same or different) stood or fell over the question of hybridity, that is intra-racialfertility" (9). Furthermore, hybridity was a key term in managing and explaining the ambivalent colonial attraction to and repul- sion from racial Others. "Theories of race were thus also covert theories of desire" (9), and Young identifies "the [sado-masochistic] violence of colo- nial desire" (108). One of ColonialDesire's great strengths is its insistence on rigorous his- toricization to correct some easy oppositions in contemporary cultural the- ory: essentialism versus constructionism, race versus culture, hybridity ver- sus racism. Young argues: "The question is whether the old essenrializing categories of cultural identity, or of race, were really so essentialized, or have been retrospectively constructed as more fixed than they were. When we look at the texts of racialtheory, we find that they are in fact contradic- tory, disruptive and already deconstructed. Hybridity here is a key term in that wherever it emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism" (27). Young's excellent chapter "The Complicity of Culture: Arnold's Ethno- S I G N S Winter 1998 I 533

graphicPolitics" shows that Arnold's construction of Englishness,however canonical,was not the organicistone often ascribedto him and to moder- nity in general.Even Gobineau'sapparently essentialist notion of race, Youngdemonstrates, "has always been culturallyconstructed. Culture has alwaysbeen raciallyconstructed" (54). Similarly,he cautionsthat familiar- ity with the genealogy of the term hybridityshould make us awarethat in our currentcelebrations of it, we use the vocabularyof the Victorian extremeRight. Although not explicitlyfeminist, Colonial Desire is a valuableresource for genderstudies. First, "in introducinga problematicof sexualityat the coreof raceand culture, hybridity suggests the necessityof revisingnorma- tive estimates of the position of woman in nineteenth-centurysocio- culturaltheory" (19). Second,because theories of hybridityare genealogi- cally relatedto the question of interracialreproduction, "hybridity as a culturaldescription will alwayscarry with it an implicitpolitics of hetero- sexuality,which may be a furtherreason for contestingits contemporary pre-eminence"(25). Third,the book explores"the emergence of desirein history,its genealogyand disavowalin the historyof racializedthought" (xi). In the provocativeconclusion, Young argues that (post)colonialstud- ies could usefullycomplement Edward Said's analysis of Orientalistrepre- sentationswith an understanding,derived from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus,of the Empireas a desiringmachine driven by capitalism. This combination,Young argues, enables us to theorizethe discursivecon- structionsof colonialism,while recognizing"the materialgeopolitics of colonialhistory as, at the sametime, an agonisticnarrative of desire"(174). Anne McClintock'sImperial Leather also developswhat she callsa "situ- atedpsychoanalysis" (72) to effecta "decolonizationof psychoanalysisand a psychoanalysisof colonialism"(74) by exploringthe relationshipamong domesticity,desire, and female labor in VictorianEngland and its colonies. Its centralargument is that "thecult of industrialrationality and the cult of domesticityformed a crucialbut concealedalliance" (168). McClintock offersinsightful readings of Victoriansoap and polish advertisementsand arguesthat even as these advertisementsfetishized domestic hygiene and cleanlinessas partof what she calls"commodity racism" and "commodity spectacle,"crucial to imperialnationalisms, they erasedwomen's laborious productionof that domesticcleanliness. McClintock reads the diariesand photographsof ArthurMunby and his mistress/wife/maidservantHannah Cullwickas fantasiesof transgressingVictorian iconographies of raceand domesticity.Of Cullwick'sfetishistic attachment to a slave-band,McClin- tock argues:"The cross-culturalexperiences marked by the fetish fuse in the slave-band:in the triangularrelations among slaveryas the basis of 534 I Book Reviews mercantile capitalism; wage labor as the basis of industrial capitalism; and domestic labor as the basis of patriarchy.By flagrantlywearing on her body the fetish leather of bonded labor Cullwick threw into question the liberal separation of private and public, insisting on exhibiting her work, her dirt, her value in the home: that space putatively beyond both slave labor and wage labor" (151-52). If analyzing the fetish offers McClintock one way of rejoining psychoanalysis and history, Marx and Freud, so does her com- pelling critique of the Freudian oedipal complex. McClintock argues that the oedipal dramamust be entirely rewritten if one takes into consideration the centrality of the nurse and the governess, on whose subordinated labor Freud's middle-class family romance depends (90). Throughout, McClintock is concerned with analyzing the articulations and displacements among race, class, gender, and sexuality and with an- swering the question, "What kind of agencyis possible in situations of ex- treme social inequality?"(140). To this end, she advocates a fourfold femi- nist theory of nationalism, which involves "(1) investigating the gendered formation of sanctioned male theories; (2) bringing into historical visibil- ity women's active cultural and political participation in national forma- tions; (3) bringing nationalist institutions into critical relation with other social structures and institutions; and (4) at the same time paying scrupu- lous attention to the structures of racial, ethnic and class power that con- tinue to bedevil privileged forms of feminism" (357). In the course of addressing these concerns, McClintock provides productive analyses of Frantz Fanon's and Homi Bhabha's conceptions of agency (360-68), ide- ologies of motherhood and family in competing South African literary and political nationalisms, the white colonial feminist Olive Schreiner'saccount of the relations between marriage and prostitution, and the politics of The LongJourney of PoppieNongena, a memoir written "collaboratively"by a black and a white South African woman. Lucidly written, wide-ranging in its scope, supple and rigorous in its analysis, and impressive in its consis- tent theorization of gender in relation to other axes of power, Imperial Leatheris a major contribution to materialistfeminist scholarship. FranFoise Lionnet raises the issues of hybridity and female agency in relation to a more traditionallyconstrued literarycriticism. PostcolonialRep- resentations'interest in focusing on literarytexts is twofold. First, literature and literary criticism analyze and represent "the subjectiveexperience of muted groups" (187-88). Second, "the ambiguities and indeterminacies inherent in the literarytexts prevent the articulation of rigid or universaliz- ing theoretical conclusions" (186). Yet the book is neither relativist nor antitheoretical. Rather, in analyzing a wide range of texts from Africa, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and France, Lionnet attempts a "comparativefemi- SI G N S Winter 1998 I 535 nism"(187). The texts"evince a patternof influenceand cross-fertilization in theiruse of themesand in theirconcern for the negativemythic images of women (Medusa,Jezebel, Salome, the Furies,the Amazon, the mad woman,the hysteric)which they exploitand translate into powerfullysub- versive fictions" (106). Theorizing them comparativelycontributes to Lionnets projectof understandingdiversity and commonalitytogether. Thus, she argues,"mdtissage (hybridity or creolization)is 'universal,'even if, in each specificcontext, power relationsproduce widely varyingcon- figurations,hierarchies, dissymmetries, and contradictions"(4). YetLion- net distinguishesbetween the universalisthumanism of the Enlightenment and that of postcolonialwomen's fiction and between postmodernism's relativizationand fragmentation and those of postcolonialwomen's fiction. The distinctionswould be made clearer,however, if the postcolonialuni- versalismsand multiculturalismswere preciselyand consistentlydefined. The book's two excellentchapters on the North Africanpractice of femaleexcision serve as a test case for variousclaims about cross-cultural universalityand relativism,human rights, culturalautonomy, and female choice and agency.One difficultyarises, however, when Lionnetopposes Frenchcriminalization of the practicerather than its preventionby educa- tion: while her argumentsfor culturalautonomy and respectfor customs do persuadeabout judicial racism in France,they also riskreinstating the very culturalrelavatism she elsewherecritiques so eloquently(156, 158, 164). Moreover,the chargeof Frenchdisregard for the "custom"is a tricky one, given Lionnet'sacknowledgment of resistanceto that custom from within the immigrantMalian community in France.In her richlynuanced readingof NawalEl Saadawi'snovel Womanat PointZero,she takesup this issue of internal cultural resistance,analyzing the interactionof two women, separatedby classand education,but both excised- one a prosti- tute jailedfor murderingher pimp, the other the psychoanalystnarrator who visitsher in jail.Her readingof the novel carefullyaddresses questions of feministactivism, identification, and intersubjectivity. Complementaryin their choice of eras, regions, and texts, the three books interrogatethe historicalrelationships among culturalhybridity, psychoanalysis,universalism, and imperial capital. Equally important, they all provideinsightful metacritical analyses of the consequencesof the cur- rentemphasis on culturalhybridity for "contemporary"feminist and post- colonialstudies. I