Re-Orienting Whiteness , and: The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Re-Orienting Whiteness, and: The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region Satadru Sen Re-Orienting Whiteness. Edited by Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.) The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region. Edited by Ashwini Tambe and Harald Fischer-Tine. (London: Routledge, 2009.) Both volumes reviewed here take off from what has now become a familiar launching point for studies of whiteness: Ann Stoler's contention that modern concepts of race and gender, including metropolitan assumptions, were profoundly shaped by colonial experiences. They reflect, at the same time, Homi Bhabha's assertion that whiteness is a 'strategy of authority.' Not surprisingly, the editors and contributors in each case focus on situations of anxiety and represent colonialism as a set of productive anxieties brought about by new configurations of power: the imperial redistribution of bodies and identities, climates and terrains, homes and neighbors. Re-Orienting Whiteness attempts to affiliate the historiography of whiteness with postcolonial studies. The editors set out explicitly to provincialize America—which has been at the center of the history of whiteness—by moving beyond the mechanisms of slavery, labor and anti-immigrant mobilization, and highlighting settler-colonial experiences, particularly in Australia. This, of course, imposes its own limitations: the volume does not engage substantially with whiteness in predominantly black settings. Nor are the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which would appear to be critically important in the emergence of whiteness, frequently visited. Nevertheless, it attempts to cover several broad themes: the relationship between whiteness and space, the production of whiteness in transnational zones, and the biopolitics of race. The format of the book, which contains nearly twenty chapters, is somewhat unfortunate, because it imposes a penalty on the depth of each analysis: there is only so much that one can do in ten pages. The effect on the volume is cumulative; for instance, it raises but does not pursue the vital issue of 'abdicating' whiteness beyond a fleeting discussion in Louise Newman's chapter on miscegenation and legislating whiteness. Likewise, Newman's (rather curious) question, 'Why would a European woman [marry or have sex with indigenous people], if presumably there were European men available to her?' is not fully answered. A more productive way of exploring miscegenation would have been to consider the history of delinquency on the one hand, and a gendered norm—Andre Beteille's 'sexual gain'—on the other. For all its emphasis on transnational and imperial frames of analysis, the volume does not attempt to go beyond the Anglophone world or a British-empire-plus-America formula. It offers, instead, a throwaway line in Angela Woolacott's essay that 'Algeria and other non-British examples of white settler colonialism are in the same frame.' Leigh Boucher, however, does a convincing job of showing race-making to be an inter-colonial field of consultation and expertise. Boucher also brings up the importance of non-European settlers in the articulation of settle-colonial whiteness. This is further explored in Margaret Allen's beautifully researched chapter on 'mixed' families and the Australian state. It also comes up in another outstanding essay, Tracey Banivanua Mar's analysis of the 'Bunya Black' panic, when white settlers in Queensland found themselves struggling to differentiate between Australian aborigines and imported Melanesian laborers. Banivanua Mar argues persuasively that whiteness in a multiracial colony is shaped by access to legitimate violence. Her observation that whiteness is an essentially empty category defined against what it is not, however, is contestable; it is surely as valid, if not more valid, to argue that non-white identities, which were ascribed to various groups of 'natives' by self-designated whites, were constituted by their absence of white matter. Marilyn Lake's essay on race-making and nationalism in the early-twentieth-century Pacific world has a tantalizing mention of Japanese participation in conversations about race, civilization and legitimate power, but the author does not engage the topic substantially like John Dower does in his brilliant War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. In the same chapter...