Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home

George, Rosemary Marangoly

doi:10.2307/1354457

Cited by 52 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The 1888 guide The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook provides a powerful insight into how domesticity was used both as a marker of civility/savagery in colonial rule. The desired push for domesticity in the ‘inhospitable’ environment of the Raj is described as central to the maintenance of British colonial rule: Here (in India), as there (in England), the end and object is not merely personal comfort, but the formation of a home, that unit of civilization where father and children, master and servant, employer and employed, can learn their several duties (cited in George (1994: 114) my additions).The parallel between the gendered and raced order of the home and the governance of India was how paternalist authority was justified but it also shaped interventionist government (Grewal, 1996: 44). As George (1994, 114) illustrates, for English reformists, ‘the only way of changing this sorry state of affairs in the Indian home is to work on the Indian woman’.…”

Section: Colonial Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here (in India), as there (in England), the end and object is not merely personal comfort, but the formation of a home, that unit of civilization where father and children, master and servant, employer and employed, can learn their several duties (cited in George (1994: 114) my additions).…”

Section: Colonial Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Owens details how campaigns of pacification and counter-insurgency frequently focussed on destroying the homes of local populations (burning villages, evictions and forced land removal) and equally rehousing (re-domesticating) these risky subjects in purpose-built dwellings, labour camps and military installations (such as the first concentration camps of the Boer war) (Owens, 2015). Thus, homemaking in empire was configured around a dual promise of developing and violently taming ‘undomesticated’ subjects because ‘Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire’ (George, 1994: 108).…”

Section: Colonial Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

Turner

2017

Environ Plan D

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This article examines how the UK's Troubled Families Programme (TFP) works as a strategy of domestication which produces and delimits certain forms of 'family life'. Drawing upon critical geographies of home and empire, the article explores how the TFP works to manage the troubled family as part of a longer history of regulating unruly households in the name of national health and civilisation. Viewing the TFP as part of the production of heteronormative order, highlights how the policy remobilises and reconfigures older forms of colonial rule which work to demarcate between civility/savagery, the developable/undevelopable. In examining the postcolonial dimension of neoliberal social policy, the article stresses how the TFP relies on racializing and sexualised logics of socio-biological control borrowed from imperial eugenics. Reading the TFP in this way contributes to our understanding of neoliberal rule. That the troubled family can be either domesticated or destroyed (through benefit sanctions and eviction) equally reveals the extent to which domesticity works as a key site for the production of both 'worthy' and 'surplus' life.

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Section: Colonial Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Colonial Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Colonial Domesticitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

Turner

2017

Environ Plan D

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“…2 That narrative shifted somewhat with the formal end of colonialism, especially the Raj, when many expatriated British sahibs began to depict memsahibs or "lady masters" as domestic ogres, who, through their tyrannical rule of the colonial household, were responsible for undermining imperial race relations and thus orchestrating the failure of Empire (Barr 1976;Callaway 1987;MacMillan 1988;Sharpe 1993;Strobel 1991). Rather than perpetuate the myth that Western women constituted the heartbeat of colonialism, or the equally problematic notion that their 'civilizing' presence in colonial contexts was benign, postcolonial feminist scholars have explored the ambivalent, contingent, multiple, and shifting discourses of power that organize a diverse range of Western women's published colonial-era literature, including the journals, novels, advice manuals, and travel narratives written during their residence aboard (e.g., Blunt 1994Blunt , 1999Clancy-Smith 1998;George 1994;Ghose 1998;Grewal 1996;Jayawardena 1995;Jayaweera 1990;McEwan 1994;Mills 1996;Nair 1990;Paxton 1992;Spivak 1985;Ware 1992).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

What To Wear, What To Wear?: Western Women and Imperialism in Gilgit, Pakistan

Cook

2005

Qual Sociol

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In this paper I inaugurate a feminist sociology of imperialism that extends the work of postcolonial scholars interested in explaining how Western women are located in global projects of imperialism. As part of an ethnographic study of the lives of contemporary development workers in Gilgit, northern Pakistan, this analysis describes and theorizes the significance of clothing choices to the formation of Western women's subjectivities and to transcultural power relations in this postcolonial setting. I demonstrate that decisions Western women make about what to wear in Gilgit develop into arenas of socio-cultural inclusion and exclusion through processes of identification and differentiation, as clothing styles are used to naturalize power hierarchies between Western and local Muslim women.In this country, Western women's identity is often focused on the dupatta. Wear it or not wear it. Resent it. Wear it with resentment. Hate it, and express that hate elsewhere. All that focus on a stupid piece of cloth. It must be a lot of other things, actually, being verbalized in that one thing (Jane, 2000). This paper addresses one of the main questions posed by postcolonial feminist theorists across disciplinary boundaries: How are Western women 1 located in global projects of imperialism? Literary theorists, geographers, and historians who have tackled this complex problem argue that the dominant narrative in the Correspondence should be directed to Nancy Cook, . 1 Throughout the paper I usually use the term "Western women" to describe Euro-American women as a social group. I realize that group designations (e.g., Northerners, metropolitans, subalterns) are problematic in that they can be ambiguous, homogenizing, exclusionary and over-inclusive. With these difficulties in mind, I employ the term in keeping with what is most commonly used within postcolonial literatures and by my research participants to describe themselves. Moreover, my analysis outlines the complex differences among individual women of this group, which helps unsettle the term's homogenizing tendencies. 3510162-0436/05/1200-0351/0 C 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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“…7 Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, imaginative geographies of Britain positioned it as home, linking into wider debates about the construction and definition of 'self ' so crucial to political discourses of British nationalism and imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 8 Represented as beautiful, temperate and domesticated, Britain was seen as the place of belonging for the imperial elite. 9 Not only were their attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles seen as well suited to the environment there, such personal qualities meant that they deserved to be there, and return home was constructed as their reward for being away.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Imperial geographies of home: Memsahibs and Miss-Sahibs in India and Britain, 1915-1947

Gowans¹

2003

cultural geographies

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Recent debates concerning both transnational and diasporic populations have pointed to the complex and fluid senses of belonging experienced by many of those moving - or being moved - across borders and away from homelands. In particular it has been emphasized that as well as promoting a sense of plurilocality, such movements frequently evoke intense and privileged understandings of the homeland. In this paper, I highlight the multi-directionality that is often demonstrated by such populations, and reflect on the implications that physical (rather than just conceptual) movement between imagined and material geographies of home might have for senses of belonging. In order to do this I explore the experiences of middle-class British women and children who travelled repeatedly between India and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. I discuss their senses of belonging, self and home as they moved between the two countries, and begin to examine not only the implications for maintaining notions of Britain as home but also the ways in which this operates at a number of scales, including the domestic, national and imperial.

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Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home

Cited by 52 publications

References 8 publications

Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

Domesticating the ‘troubled family’: Racialised sexuality and the postcolonial governance of family life in the UK

What To Wear, What To Wear?: Western Women and Imperialism in Gilgit, Pakistan

Imperial geographies of home: Memsahibs and Miss-Sahibs in India and Britain, 1915-1947

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