Reviewed by: Penetrating Critiques: Emasculated Empire and Victorian Identity in Africa by Leslie Allin Jochen Petzold (bio) Leslie Allin, Penetrating Critiques: Emasculated Empire and Victorian Identity in Africa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), pp. x + 306, $80 cloth. In her well-researched and well-written study, Leslie Allin traces signs of anxiety in a range of texts about Africa from the last quarter of the nineteenth century, including archival documents, newspaper reports, and popular fiction. She aims to show that “these texts, ostensibly profoundly invested in empire, in fact trouble the imperial tenets of bounded martial bodies, ordered colonial territories, and solid histories” (3). Throughout her study, Allin is particularly interested in tropes of fluidity that threaten to engulf, swallow, dissolve, and thus also penetrate the body of the colonial adventurer or soldier, as well as the inability of fictional narrators to exercise authorial control. The book is organized into three parts, each comprising two chapters: one looking at archival material or newspaper reports, the other treating [End Page 378] specific examples from popular fiction. The first part, “Ruptures in Adventure Romance,” examines letters and reports from the Zulu War of 1879, which Allin describes as a “crucial transition in British conceptions of imperial masculinity and the authority of the imperial narrative” (23). She shows convincingly how the humiliating defeat of British forces at Isandlwana led to descriptions of the Zulu “with imagery that oscillates between a penetrating phallus and an engulfing vagina dentata” (32). Allin reads the texts for signs of anxieties expressed in sexualized terms or images, particularly those indicative of castration or the penetration of the male body. In the case of the Zulu War, she shows how these anxieties deconstruct the traditional view of the soldier as hero; these views and particularly the ideal of the gentleman soldier were further undercut when the British took revenge for their defeats with extreme cruelty. Allin combines her analysis of the reports on the Zulu War with a reading of H. Rider Haggard’s highly popular adventure novels King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). Both texts have been frequently read as ultimately strengthening imperial discourse. Against these assessments, Allin argues convincingly that these texts, “far from simply acting out fantasies of empire or frankly championing British masculinity, playfully ridicule dominant models of British masculinity while simultaneously underscoring the limitations of imperial narrative authority” (59). The second section, “Gothic Penetrations,” reads newspaper reports and General Gordon’s journals on the siege and eventual fall of Khartoum in 1885 alongside Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897). Allin argues that writing becomes “profoundly unstable” in this Gothic horror shocker because it is “limited,” “betrays fissures,” and “traces the circulation of unacknowledged desires” (151). In the third part, “Modernist Dissolutions,” Allin examines reports on a spree of cannibalistic killings in Sierra Leone that lasted from the 1860s into the twentieth century. The atrocities were committed by a secret organization known as the Human Leopard Society, and in their attempts to control the situation, the colonial administration condoned cruel reprisals by local chiefs that relied on identifying perpetrators through “a fetish dance or orgie” (169). In Allin’s analysis, this imperial archive “constitutes a regulatory fantasy that ultimately fails—it exposes the complicity of white British men in atrocities that the West repeatedly characterized as peculiar to African cultures” (193). Allin calls this “a Kurtz situation,” and indeed she examines Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) in the last chapter (181). Much of the existing criticism on Conrad’s novella reads the text as critical of and at the same time complicit in the colonial project. Thus, while Allin can call for a critical shift in the treatment of Haggard and Marsh, her addition to the body of Conrad criticism is less fundamental, though still important. She aims to show that the critique of imperialism [End Page 379] operates “through Marlow’s, the frame narrator’s, and potentially the reader’s engulfment in this ideology” (199). Indeed, Allin concludes that “the reader is invited to entrench in the ideology of the text through necessary reliance on shared cultural references in order to construct meaning and in so doing, to capitulate...
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Feb 22, 2024
Christopher W Koekemoer 
Open Access
