February 2001 ISBN 921870-85-X   5 3/4 x 9 32 pp, $8.95 pb pamphlet Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism

 

In her University of British Columbia Sedgwick Lecture for 2000, Professor Anne McClintock ranges from England to America, to the Congo and South Africa, and from the early nineteenth century to the present. She reveals the connections among gender, race and madness created by the dominant power centres. In her examples, she is equally at home with the short story writer Bessie Head, the novelists Charlotte Bronte and Joseph Conrad and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung — as well as with the many commercial advertisements from the nineteenth century that conjoin whiteness and moral superiority. She shows how Western discourse figured mental deviance as a form of racial deviance, as in the figure of Bertha Mason, the unwanted wife in Jane Eyre. On a larger scale, these same imperial centres portrayed cultures such as the Irish and the Zulus as occupying "anachronistic space." Such cultures were allowed a presence but were typed as archaic and touched with the irrational, thus keeping them at a supposedly safe distance. But as McClintock reveals, a problem arises once one has to deal with those in the colonial situation who were actually in mental institutions, often as a result of the disruptions of imperialism, and who need to be cured or made "normal." Given this situation, mental illness becomes a threshold category which marks a sustained crisis for what can be thought of as "normal." While fascinated by the ways in which the self, nation and race are constructed in discourse, McClintock also asks us to move beyond discourse studies to investigate the actual people who bore the marks of imperial legislation on their bodies.

Anne McClintock is the Simone de Beauvoir Chair of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin. Her ground-breaking study, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995), has had a major impact on our thinking in the areas of colonial and post-colonial studies and in cultural analyses of representations of race, gender and sexuality. She has edited many collections of essays of post-colonial theory and on the sex industry, most notably Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender (1997). At present she is working on a collection of essays on commercial sex, provisionally entitled Screwing the System.