Bringing the Empire Home: Race, Class, and Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa

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University of Chicago Press, 2004 - History - 222 pages
How did South Africans become black? How did the idea of blackness influence conceptions of disadvantaged groups in England such as women and the poor, and vice versa?

Bringing the Empire Home tracks colonial images of blackness from South Africa to England and back again to answer questions such as these. Before the mid-1800s, black Africans were considered savage to the extent that their plight mirrored England's internal Others—women, the poor, and the Irish. By the 1900s, England's minority groups were being defined in relation to stereotypes of black South Africans. These stereotypes, in turn, were used to justify both new capitalist class and gender hierarchies in England and the subhuman treatment of blacks in South Africa. Bearing this in mind, Zine Magubane considers how marginalized groups in both countries responded to these racialized representations.

Revealing the often overlooked links among ideologies of race, class, and gender, Bringing the Empire Home demonstrates how much black Africans taught the English about what it meant to be white, poor, or female.
 

Contents

The Figurative Uses and Abuses of Blackness
1
CHAPTER TWO Capitalism Female Embodiment and the Transformation of Commodification into Sexuality
14
Race Nomadism and the Image of the Urban Poor
40
Gender Strife Class Conflict and the Changing Definitions of Race
69
African Bodies the AngloBoer War and the Imagining of the Bourgeois Self
95
Unmasking and Unveiling the Meanings of Whiteness
129
CHAPTER SEVEN What Is African America to Me? Africans African Americans and the Rearticulation of Blackness
153
CONCLUSION
185
REFERENCES
197
INDEX
209
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About the author (2004)

Zine Magubane is an associate professor of sociology and African studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Postmodernism, Postcoloniality, and African Studies.