Intimate Empires: Body, Race, and Gender in the Modern World

Intimate Empires: Body, Race, and Gender in the Modern World offers an interpretive synthesis of recent scholarship on intersections of gender, race, and empire from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. It untangles the embodied experiences and representations of people all over the world in the era of Europe’s global dominance. Studies of intimate experiences complicate narratives of imperialism that have traditionally revolved around political and economic developments and thus obscured the ways in which ordinary people ignored, survived, co-opted, or even subverted imperialists and their institutions. The book discusses the development and coproduction of metropolitan and colonial identities alike, incorporating art, children’s literature, cookbooks, and sport in addition to migration, missionary work, and legal trials. Organized thematically, each of the six chapters moves from the mid-eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries to unfold an aspect of identity.