Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire

by Radhika Mohanram
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2007
248 pp. Trade, $67.50; paper, $22.50
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4779-8; ISBN: 978-0-8166-4780-4.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

A fifth of the European population left the continent between 1820 and 1914 in migration to populate Europe’s colonies, or former ones.  Analyzing whiteness contextualized in nineteenth-century colonialism, Radhika Mohanram shows how British imperial culture shaped its colonies India, Australia and New Zealand, and how to rule imperial colonies shifted—and gave new meanings to—what it meant to be British.

Following the introduction “Postcolonial, Non-Victorian, Nonwhite”, Imperial White is divided into two sections, “In the Metropole” and “In the South”, with three essays in each.  “White Masculinity: Playing at Rugby and the Sepoy Mutiny” links two important events of 1857, the publication of the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays —which birthed the genre of manly, adventurous public school fiction—-and the mutinous subjects of India, whose resistance so alarmed the imperial capital London.  “The Whiteness of Women: In Theory and Under Lock and Key” and “Victoria’s Secret: The History of White Sexuality” examine colonial constraints upon women.

Moving outside of London, “White Water: Race and Oceans Down Under” examines bathing in Australia.  Mohanram has taught in New Zealand, and is familiar with south seas colonial history. “Dermographia: How the Irish Became White in India” builds upon David Roediger’s work on the Irish immigrants’ ascent to the status of white people in the US.  “ Mourning and Melancholia: The Wages of Whiteness” employs deft Freudcraft, linming lingering sorrows that accompany the depredations of conquest, as well as questioning the status of the vaunted melancholic temperament.  This reviewer is surprised that Walter Benjamin isn’t somehow mentioned here, for Susan Sontag found him squarely “Under the Sign of Saturn” in the practice of his studies of one colonial capital, Paris.  Still, Mohanram’s essay memorably demonstrates how science is constructed and misused, often having fabricated findings and justifications to oppress rather than aid subject peoples.

Radhika Mohanram teaches in the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Cardiff University, Wales.  In this book, she sometimes leaves us deep in the dark jargon-spiked thicket of postcolonial theory, where things are too often cathected or inscribed upon subject bodies, rather than simply described for study in the non-academic light of day.  Nevertheless, Imperial White is a welcome addition to the postcolonial studies shelf, and deepens the reader’s understanding of the depraved and all-too-lingering imagery of imperialism and race.  In publishing this serious work on Great Britain and its colonial antipodes, the University of Minnesota Press encourages further research of this quality to be applied to the United States.  Perhaps they will, as soon as my nation can truly be said to have entered its own postcolonial era.