[Bilimsel Haber] Bk rev.: Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. /Bodies in Contact:
Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History./ Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2005. xii + 445 pp. Bibliography, index. $89.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8223-3455-0; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8223-3467-4.
*
Reviewed by:* Carolyn Goffman, Department of English, DePaul University.
*
Published by:* H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(December, 2005)

Close Contact, Crossing Boundaries

In Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History,
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have assembled a first-rate
collection of essays that re-energizes the concept of "world history."
The body, as the editors note, is the first colonial encounter and the
most intimate colony. The earliest European travelers describe natives
as "bodies," and imperial projects manage, police, and transform
individual bodies. Bodies, the editors argue, are the first-line agents
in historical encounters, and placing them in the methodological
foreground offers "students of world history the chance to understand
the extent to which such powerfully embodied colonial encounters
structured the workings of transnational communities and global circuits
of power" (p. 406).

This book is also a terrific read. These narratives of worldwide
colonial encounters--including, for example, an African woman's
diplomatic and personal engagement with seventeenth-century Dutch
settlers, a conservative Ottoman diplomat's warm intellectual friendship
with a worldly Russian woman, and an English family man's experience of
settler imperialism on the cusp of institutionalized racism--all serve
to remind the reader not only that history rests on individual
encounters, but that history is "story," coming from individual feeling
and experience. The variety and quality of these diverse narratives make
the book attractive to the general reader, and Bodies in Contact indeed
could be useful in the undergraduate classroom.

World history as a discipline is, as the editors note, under contention.
Ballantyne and Burton argue that despite academia's increased emphasis
on globalization and the well-recognized effects of imperialism and
colonization, world history as a subject area has not received the
attention it merits. The editors note that, in fact, scholarship from a
multitude of disciplines is integral to world history, and they suggest
that scholars could benefit by learning from each other. This is
certainly true. But in the busy professional lives of most
teacher/scholars, how does one find time to read research from other
disciplines? How often does an Ottoman historian pick up literary
criticism, and when can the busy Medievalist find time to read
anthropology?

Ballantyne and Burton, themselves specialists in studies of imperialism
and colonialism, appreciate the dilemma of the over-extended
teacher/scholar. Bodies in Contact is in a sense the world history
course packet that we all wish we had time to put together. It concerns
not only colonial "contact zones," in Mary Louise Pratt's influential
phrase, but also scholarly ones. The essays mirror the editors' purpose
of uniting a disparate audience: just as interactions between
individuals are at the heart of "globalization," so is
cross-disciplinary dialogue a main point of this volume. The editors do
not forget that their readers are also educators. Just as colonialism
and empire building "shape everyday life at a global level, influencing
the languages we speak, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the music
we listen to, and the arts and culture we are inspired by" (p. 1), so
has the legacy of colonialism shaped our classrooms.

Rich with historical and personal detail, this volume is accessible to
students as well as to scholars in a variety of fields. Even as it makes
scholarly diversity its essential argument, Bodies in Contact displays a
strong thematic unity strengthened by the originality and solid
documentation behind each essay. The editors here have assembled expert
voices that rarely appear together in the same forum. In a field
dominated by area studies, in which most scholars specialize both
geographically and temporally, this collection is remarkable.

Most of the essays have appeared in expanded form elsewhere; the editors
here have brought them together here in a format more accessible for
non-specialist readers.

The editors divide the collection into three sections, framed by a
useful introduction and conclusion that carefully delineate the unifying
theme. The three sections have chronological coherence, the first being
the early modern period, the second the height of European imperialism,
and the third the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each section
includes widely diverse geographical areas and cultural encounters,
linked by individuals' physical experiences of colonialism.

Section 1, "The Thresholds of Modernity: Mapping Genders," provides
revelatory insights into early colonial negotiations. Essays here
emphasize "the place of race, gender, and sexuality in empire building
during the early modern period" and demonstrate the "centrality of the
body" in the "dynamics of cross-cultural contact" (p. 5). Roots of
future imperial racism appear in the early modern period's visions of
masculinity and colonialism's discourse of gender. Most strikingly,
these essays break down familiar and inadequate dichotomies and
illustrate the moments at which colonialism and empire became gendered
and racialized.

Section 1 moves among several continents. Rosalind O'Hanlon's essay
explores the cross-cultural tensions of masculinity within South Asian
Mughal society in the eighteenth century. Emma Jinhua Teng demonstrates
how Chinese Qing dynasty colonizers in other parts of Asia used the
discourse of gender to demarcate the "civilized" from the "uncivilized."
Jennifer L. Morgan shows how seventeenth-century English depictions of
the female African body as "monstrous" abetted the colonizing project.
Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez explores how the competing dualism in the
"collision of two cosmologies," Spanish Christianity and Aztec belief,
changed views of women's sexuality. Julia C. Wells's essay on "Eva's
Men" presents a moving story of an African woman's personal and
political affiliations with the Dutch East India Company: her narrative
uses European sources to discover as much as possible about "Eva's"
hidden voice. The final essay in this section returns us to Europe to
view the effect of worldwide colonialism on those who remained at home:
Sean Quinlan shows how eighteenth-century French ideas about hygiene,
climate, and the body spilled over from the institution of slavery and
demonstrates how the ambivalences and fears of colonial expansion
extended even to those who would never leave Europe.

The second section, "Global Empires, Local Encounters," explores the
impact of colonial law and bureaucracy on the intimate and everyday
aspects of an individual's life. Mary Ann Fay's essay follows the
financial and personal history of an ex-slave woman in pre-Napoleonic
Egypt, and in so doing illustrates Ottoman constructs of gender and
citizenship. Fay's essay is especially valuable in a World History
volume because it shows the complex workings of a non-European empire in
a way too rarely seen in Eurocentric scholarship. Fay demonstrates, for
example, that women in early modern Islamic societies enjoyed greater
property rights than did most European and North American women at the
same period. Similarly, Fay makes abundant use of primary documents to
explain the nuances of non-racialized Ottoman slavery and the laws
relating to women's ownership, administration, and inheritance of property.

English-language primary sources can usefully be re-interrogated to
reveal new information about colonial relationships, as Adele Perry's
essay on British Columbia shows. Hybridity in the form of marriage and
business relations between Europeans and native North Americans
flourished into the ninteenth century, and mixed-race families were
instrumental in building up trade in Canada; however, when the British
government increased its administrative networks, such families were
viewed in racialized terms and were shut out of social and power
structures.

Similarly, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy examines white immigrant accounts
written in English that tell the story of the "public mothers" of the
American West, some of whose names still linger in the Great Lakes area.
These Creole women mediated domestic quarrels and treated family
illnesses, negotiating the personal affairs of white and native
communities. This essay illustrates the mutuality of purpose among the
early populations of the American West, and remind us of how white
American hegemony has suppressed such voices until they all but
disappeared.

Mrinalini Sinha also uses sources written in English to examine British
sexism and racism in men's clubs in colonial India, organizations that
were not simply reproductions of London clubs, but that served as a
"privileged site for mediating the contradictory logic of Eurocentrism
in the creation of a distinctive colonial public sphere" (p. 184). Not
only did such clubs exclude English women and "native" men, but they
refined their definition of "whiteness" to exclude the lower-class
British in India. Protecting white women from native men established the
gendered racism of the clubs, but the concept of "clubbability" that
eliminated lower-class whites further limited the colonial definition of
"whiteness."

Patrick F. McDevitt's essay on team sports in Ireland reminds us that
colonial racism was not restricted to matters of skin color. Images of
Irish manhood countered the memories of the Irish Famine (1845-1847) and
the revival of "ancient traditions" of hurling was an important part of
the modernizing mission of Irish independence.

Elisa Camiscioli's essay on French anxiety over early-twentieth-century
low birth rates shows the rhetorical re-configuration of certain
immigrant populations. In an effort to keep France "white," pronatalists
"re-wrote" Italian, Spanish, and Polish immigrants so that they
exemplified French values of hard work and family, thus maintaining
hierarchical racial distinctions and countering the declining "French"
birthrate.

In "Race Hysteria, Darwin 1938," Fiona Paisley delineates multi-cultural
interactions in an Australian town where an Aboriginal man was accused
of raping a white woman. The incident illustrates not only the
ambivalence and complexities of racialized sexuality in the settler
communities, but it also brings out the complex cultural organization
among European and Asian settlers.

Heidi Gengenbach presents a very different kind of narrative in which
colonized bodies of women in southern Mozambique undergo a literal
erasure (p. 337). Women used body markings to mark community
affiliations and record history; however, European missionaries, in a
"near religious crusade" that extended into the twentieth century sought
to eliminate women's tattoos (p. 255). Gengenbach's sources include
travelers' accounts, earlier works of anthropology, and her own interviews.

The final section of Bodies in Contact, "The Mobility of Politics and
the Politics of Mobility," crosses time periods and directly gets at the
heart of the book's theme: people meeting people.

Carter Vaughn Findley, with his conservative yet curious Ottoman
traveler who "returned the gaze," introduces readers to the Ottoman
Empire's "double imperialism." Ahmed Midhat, an "Occidentalist" who made
a study of Western culture and mores, exemplifies the independent,
multinational Ottoman empire that had "slipped into economic and
political dependence" on the West (p. 278). Findley's essay, like Emma
Jinhua Teng's and Mary Ann Fay's, expands the reader's understanding of
"empire" and cross-cultural encounters.

Similarly, Siobhan Lambert Hurley writes of an indefatigable female
Muslim traveler who navigated Indian, British and Ottoman colonial
structures and brought the "private" activity of religious practice into
the public arena. Even as she affirmed her Muslim identity, Nawab Sultan
Jahan Begam's travels and ideas dovetailed with and challenged women's
nationalist activities in the Middle East and female emancipation
movements in American and Europe.

Joseph S. Alter looks at the project of "modernizing" the national body
in India in the early years of independence. The discourse of
nationalism made use of the Hindu concept of masculine celibacy. Just as
in McDevitt's essay the image of Irish manhood sought to counteract the
memories of English repression, so here two styles of masculinity assume
ideological importance: libertine masculinity is tied to an "ideology of
domination" in which the Western cult of "freedom" enslaves India, and
the brahmachari that advocates "self-control, balance, and integration
of the self" is linked with "natural truth" and the newly independent
India (p. 316).

In a fascinating essay on gender and colonialism in Soviet Uzbekistan,
Shoshana Keller details the doomed struggle of Uzbek women to satisfy
the demands of both their own culture and the imperial Soviet one. Here,
one's reactions as reader reflects the deep ambivalences of the colonial
project: while cheering the efforts of native Uzbeks to maintain their
own religion and culture in the face of Soviet oppression, one also
winces at the abuse of women that occurs in the name of that culture.
The bodies of women paid a high price: the demands of the Russians put
Uzbek women in "a terrible bind" and the tensions generated in response
to Soviet reforms resulted in the beating, rape, and murder of thousands
of women.

Similarly, Mire Koikari depicts the ambivalence towards and punishment
of women inherent in American attempts to raise the status of women in
post-World War II Japan. The American missionary style of benign
colonialism resurfaced during the U.S. occupation of Japan as women's
bodies became the site of a campaign against Oriental male oppression.
Koikari argues that, in the view of many Americans, U.S. imperialism was
a contradiction in terms: Americans sought only to "civilize" and
"modernize" Japanese women; at the same time, the Americans left women
alone to shoulder the shame and the blame for venereal disease resulting
from sexual relations with American soldiers. Most importantly, Koikari
notes that colonial studies' familiar binary frameworks are inadequate
as analytical tools to examine cases such as the U.S. occupation of
Japan. This observation can apply as well to studies of other "imperial"
relationships documented in Bodies in Contact.

Hyun Sook Kim's discussion of Korean "comfort women" also highlights the
importance of female bodies in constructions of history and nation. The
powerful, formerly hidden narratives of these women function as
political acts that "puncture received and authoritative versions of
national and imperial pasts" (p. 415).

Melani McAlister's essay makes an unusual and illuminating link between
African-American movements of the 1960s and the Arab-Israeli conflict in
the Middle East. In the struggle to define American "blackness," the
black body was at stake. Black American Christians had long identified
with the biblical Hebrews, but in a "religious re-mapping of the world"
(p. 388) the growing Nation of Islam in America turned to the Arab
Muslims and criticized the internal colonization of blacks in the U.S.

Overall, Bodies in Contact harnesses the concept of "globalization" and
reinvigorates the term. The editors focus on "bodies" in order to
dramatize the conditions created by transnational encounters and to
remind us that it is the "small stories" that can bring alive the
process of globalization and the idea of "world history."

Fifty years ago a world history class likely would have studied ancient
Greek and Roman civilizations, the Byzantine Near East, and Japan and
China, with perhaps a glance at the Ottomans and a wink at the Mughals.
More recently, world history or world civilizations courses have focused
determinedly on what used to be the "other"--Africa, the Caribbean,
Asia, and the Middle East (South America is still all too often
neglected). As more scholars have specialized in area studies, world
history has too often been marginalized as a discipline. Ballantyne and
Burton not only challenge the practice of teaching "the West and the
rest," but they here suggest ways that the history classroom can
reimagine the relationship between the metropole and its colonies and
begin to reconceive the idea of world history.