Print Price: $115.99

Format:
Paperback
424 pp.
155 mm x 234 mm

ISBN-13:
9780199978342

Copyright Year:
2016

Imprint: OUP US

Intimate Empires

Body, Race, and Gender in the Modern World

Tracey Rizzo and Steven Gerontakis

Intimate Empires: Body, Race, and Gender in the Modern World offers an interpretive synthesis of recent scholarship on intersections of gender, race, and empire from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It untangles the embodied experiences and representations of people all over the world in the era of Europe's global dominance. Studies of intimate experiences complicate narratives of imperialism that have traditionally revolved around political and economic developments and thus obscured the ways in which ordinary people ignored, survived, co-opted, or even subverted imperialists and their institutions.

The book discusses the development and coproduction of metropolitan and colonial identities alike, incorporating art, children's literature, cookbooks, and sport in addition to migration, missionary work, and legal trials. Organized thematically, each of the six chapters moves from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries to unfold an aspect of identity.

Readership : Written for advanced undergraduates in History, Gender Studies, and International Studies, Intimate Empires offers an interpretive synthesis of recent scholarship on intersections between gender, race, and empire in modern overseas empires from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

Reviews

• "In an engagingly written narrative, Intimate Empires presents a complex and absorbing analysis of the intersections of gender, race, class, and empire from the mid-eighteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Combining fascinating vignettes with cutting-edge scholarship, the book focuses on the embodied experiences of the men, women, and children-both colonizer and colonized-living lives profoundly shaped by empire. This clearly organized text demonstrates the socially constructed nature of social categories and identities, examining them within multiple shifting colonial contexts."
  --Carolyn J. Eichner, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
  
  
• "At last instructors in modern empire studies have a textbook that fully incorporates the insights of gender studies, paying full attention to both masculinities and femininities. By focusing on the body, Rizzo and Gerontakis make essential connections between race, gender, and colonialism, while their vignettes powerfully demonstrate the many ways that bodies challenged and even subverted unequal power relations."
  --Jane Samson, University of Alberta
  
  
• "Intimate Empires offers a fascinating interpretive overview of recent thinking on gender, race, and empire through deep analysis of images as evidence. Its visual thematic approach, emphasizing identity formation in six critical domains, makes the volume student friendly but also engages scholars in multiple disciplines. It is unique in a crowded field."
  --Julia Clancy-Smith, University of Arizona