p1821 -
Body, Race and Gender in the Age of European Hegemony
Over 80 images and maps reveal complex negotiations of power between colonized and colonizer on every continent in the era of European Hegemony (1750-1960). Drawn from my new co-authored book, Intimate Empires: Body, Race, and Gender in the Modern World (OUP 2016), this visually enriched narrative untangles the embodied experiences and representations of people in intimate spaces, including sexual relationships and sex-work; infant care and childrearing; cookery and clothing; fitness and racial fitness. Often disempowered legally, ordinary people ignored, survived, co-opted, or even subverted imperialists and their institutions. At the same time, imperialism as an ideology produced modern gender and race identities, hardening in proportion to proliferating anxieties about the fluidity of these identities. The resulting prohibitions against certain foods and clothing, and of physical contact, for example, led to the reorganization of space from the creation of hill stations to the segregation of neighborhoods and institutions.
The digital poster will include a rotating band of images juxtaposed in disturbing and compelling ways. For example, a photograph of an Indonesian nanny holding a Dutch boy in her arms appears after a letter from a German farmer pleading for his Namibian wife’s right to own land. A timeline of markers of intimate life (marriages, births, bodies displayed at world’s fairs, for example), will be layered over conventional timelines complicating viewers’ assumptions about hegemonic control over body, race and gender in the modern era.
Dr. Tracey Rizzo