Imperial Leather

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

Anne Mcclintock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135209100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

Introduction

Postcolonialism and the Angel of Progress

DOI: 10.4324/9780203699546-1

There are many maps of one place, and many histories of one time.

—Julie Fredriekse

Race, Money and Sexuality

In the opening pages of Henry Rider Haggard’s bestselling novel King Solomon’s Mines, we discover a map. The map, we are told, is a copy of one that leads three white Englishmen to the diamond mines of Kukuanaland somewhere in southern Africa (Fig.A.1).¹ The original map was drawn in 1590 by a Portuguese trader, Jose da Silvestre, while he was dying of hunger on the “nipple” of a mountain named Sheba’s Breasts. Traced on a remnant of yellow linen torn from his clothing and inscribed with a “cleft bone” in his own blood, da Silvestre’s map promises to reveal the wealth of Solomon’s treasure chamber, but carries with it the obligatory charge of first killing the black “witch-mother,” Gagool.

Figure A.1 The Lay of the Land.

Haggard's sketch map of the Route to King Solomon's Mines.

In this way, Haggard’s map assembles in miniature three of the governing themes of Western imperialism_ the transmission of white, male power through control of colonized women; the emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of commodity capital—three of the circulating themes of this book.

What sets Haggard’s map apart from the scores of treasure maps that emblazon colonial narratives is that his is e...