This interdisciplinary panel examines literary and visual depictions of washing spaces—riversides, public baths, washhouses—as critical sites for constructing and contesting colonial power. Moving beyond viewing washing as a mundane chore, we analyze it as a potent ethnographic and ideological practice. Through case studies of photography, children’s literature, and slave narratives across Asian, Caribbean, and North American contexts, we interrogate how the representation of washing bodies and clothes was central to producing racialized and Indigenous identities, enforcing gendered labor hierarchies, and articulating narratives of cleanliness and contamination. We treat these spaces as intimate contact zones where colonial regimes were imposed and resisted, revealing how everyday acts of labor crystallized broader structures of power and embodied defiance.
The rationale for this session is twofold. First, it brings a focused, comparative lens to a ubiquitous yet under-theorized aspect of colonial life. By centering the act of washing, we make visible the often-invisible labor of women and subaltern groups, arguing that the management of water, cleanliness, and bodies was fundamental to the colonial project. Second, the panel responds to a growing scholarly interest in the material and sensory histories of empire, moving beyond state-level analysis to the intimate, daily practices where ideologies were lived and negotiated. This session is necessary to connect disparate geographical fields and demonstrate the global consistency of using washing as a technology of social ordering.
This panel builds upon and synthesizes key interdisciplinary conversations. We engage with feminist and postcolonial scholarship on domesticity and reproductive labor (e.g., Ann Stoler, Dipesh Chakrabarty) and connect with the “hydraulic” turn in postcolonial ecocriticism that examines water’s role in structuring social life and the infrastructure of “liquid empires” (e.g., Veronica Strang, Corey Ross). By arguing that the iconography and narrative of washing are essential to understanding the embodied and environmental legacies of colonialism, this panel offers a new, focused lens on these established fields.
Tezel’s paper analyzes colonial photograph albums from the Japanese Empire, arguing that the recurring motif of Korean and Manchurian women washing by rivers was not a neutral ethnographic record but a deliberate discursive practice. These images, produced by colonial corporations, reinforced a racial hierarchy that positioned subjects as pre-modern and static, thereby justifying Japanese settler-colonial futurity. Tezel’s presentation directly relates to the panel’s core concern by demonstrating how visual representations of gendered washing labor were instrumental in constructing racial and indigenous identities within a colonial framework.
Myers examines narratives by Robert Charles Dallas and Mary Prince that depict Caribbean springs as sites where enslaved Afro-Caribbean women washed and were washed. He argues that these hydrological spaces become archives of slavery’s violence, where the water itself is mineralized by pain and becomes an agent of hydrological vengeance. Myers’s paper contributes to the panel’s theme by exploring how washing spaces in literary texts served as potent grounds for resisting exploitation and inscribing the embodied trauma of enslaved women into the very landscape, challenging colonial narratives of benign tropical abundance.
Jenna Gersie analyzes scenes of washing dishes, clothes, and bodies in Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. Gersie argues that these log cabin washing scenes contribute to settler colonialism’s project of replacement, either through the erasure of Indigenous people from Kirkland’s text or the racist criticism of them in Wilder’s, using domestic order to naturalize whiteness on the land.
This panel is committed to presenting a diversity of scholarly voices. Our panelists are at different career stages, including an advanced graduate student and postdoctoral fellows. Geographically, their work spans three continents (Asia, the Caribbean, North America), enabling a truly transnational dialogue. The panel itself is comprised of scholars from diverse institutional backgrounds, ensuring a multiplicity of viewpoints. The papers analyze a wide range of sources—from corporate photography and slave narratives to children’s literature—from the perspectives of both colonizer and colonized, offering a multifaceted examination of our central themes.
- Presider's Introduction (3 mins)
- Paper 1 (18 mins)
- Paper 2 (18 mins)
- Paper 3 (18 mins)
- Q&A (18 mins)