Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History

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AuthorAntoinette Burton
PublisherDuke University Press
PublishedMay 28 2013
Book FormatPaperback
ISBN-139780822334675
Dimensions9.2 X 6.54 X 1.16 inches
Weight 1.44 pounds
BISAC
CategoriesHistory > World - General
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

From portrayals of African women's bodies in early modern European travel accounts to the relation between celibacy and Indian nationalism to the fate of the Korean comfort women forced into prostitution by the occupying Japanese army during the Second World War, the essays collected in Bodies in Contact demonstrate how a focus on the body as a site of cultural encounter provides essential insights into world history. Together these essays reveal the body as contact zone as a powerful analytic rubric for interpreting the mechanisms and legacies of colonialism and illuminating how attention to gender alters understandings of world history. Rather than privileging the operations of the Foreign Office or gentlemanly capitalists, these historical studies render the home, the street, the school, the club, and the marketplace visible as sites of imperial ideologies.

Bodies in Contact brings together important scholarship on colonial gender studies gathered from journals around the world. Breaking with approaches to world history as the history of the West and the rest, the contributors offer a panoramic perspective. They examine aspects of imperial regimes including the Ottoman, Mughal, Soviet, British, Han, and Spanish, over a span of six hundred years--from the fifteenth century through the mid-twentieth. Discussing subjects as diverse as slavery and travel, ecclesiastical colonialism and military occupation, marriage and property, nationalism and football, immigration and temperance, Bodies in Contact puts women, gender, and sexuality at the center of the master narratives of imperialism and world history.

Contributors. Joseph S. Alter, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Elisa Camiscioli, Mary Ann Fay, Carter Vaughn Findley, Heidi Gengenbach, Shoshana Keller, Hyun Sook Kim, Mire Koikari, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Melani McAlister, Patrick McDevitt, Jennifer L. Morgan, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Rosalind O'Hanlon, Rebecca Overmyer-Vel�zquez, Fiona Paisley, Adele Perry, Sean Quinlan, Mrinalini Sinha, Emma Jinhua Teng, Julia C. Wells

Author Bio

I’m a historian of 19th and 20th century Britain and its empire, with a specialty in colonial India and an ongoing interest in Australasia and Africa. I’ve written on topics ranging from feminism and colonialism to the relationship of empire to the nation and the world. Women, gender and sexuality have always been central to my research, much of which has been concerned with the role of Indian women in the imperial and postcolonial imagination. I’ve edited collections about politics, mobility, postcolonialism and empire and have frequently collaborated with Tony Ballantyne.

At Illinois I have taught courses on modern British history and imperialism, gender and colonialism, autobiography and the archive, approaches and methods and world history. I am currently working on a Bloomsbury series on the cultures of western imperialism and a Duke University Press series on history teaching.

I am currently the director of the campus humanities center, The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. I am also the Principal Investigator for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, Humanities Without Walls.

Research Interests

Modern Britain and empire; colonial India; women, gender and feminism; postcolonial studies; world history

Education

B.A. Yale University, 1983
M.A. University of Chicago, 1984
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1990

Source: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign