Imperial White

The title of Radhika Mohanram's Imperial White is somewhat misleading, in that it does not do justice to the remarkable breadth of this wide-ranging study. In addition to interrogating whiteness and imperialism, Mohanram also considers feminism, sexuality, mourning, melancholia and even the politics and appropriation of water. The book is equally broad in its geography, moving gracefully from India, to Ireland, to the Antipodes and back again. While on paper this list of places and topics may appear loose and disparate, Imperial White is carefully structured and completely integrated, bringing each concern back to Mohanran's central examination of the conceptualization of whiteness and how it is deployed to include and exclude. Taking issue with some of the limitations of previous studies, notably Richard Dyer's White (1997), Mohanran reconsiders the interplay between class and race in formulating ideas of whiteness and Britishness. She considers how whiteness figured in nineteenth-century discourses of masculinity and goes so far as to ask whether British women were white and if domestic whiteness was somehow distinct from colonial whiteness, citing the Irish question to look at gradations of whiteness in a colonial context. In addition to the usual postcolonial suspects, Mohanran underpins her study with the work of Freud and Foucault, offering what she describes as ‘contrapuntal readings’ to reveal the interconnectedness of theoretical approaches and racial embodiment. This intelligent blend of approaches, combined with rigorous contextual work and careful literary analysis, allows Mohanran to push the boundaries of postcolonial theory towards a much more nuanced discussion of the creation and perpetuation of whiteness

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · British Empire · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Diaspora · Empire · Feminism · Human sexuality · Masculinity · Political science · Politics · Postcolonialism (international relations · Sociology · White (mutation · Gender Studies · History · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies