From Library Journal
McClintock (English, Columbia Univ.) interprets 19th-century British imperialism as the focal point for that era's major "disclosures," including feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. She describes Victorian urban space?including advertising?as being oriented to exhibit imperial spectacle based on racism and sexism. In turn, the colonies become stages for exhibiting a reinvented patriarchy, with Westerners symbolizing power and indigenous peoples a subdued domesticity. The text is an exercise in demonstrating preconceptions. While some of McClintock's evidence is original, the argument as a whole is conventional bien-pensant wisdom unlikely to convince anyone not already committed to the thesis. The presentation is further burdened by its reliance on the cliches and jargon of feminism, deconstructionism, and other currently fashionable academic ideologies. Imperialism was at once a simpler and a more complex phenomenon than McClintock's perspective allows. For large academic collections only.?D.E. Showalter, Colorado Coll., Colorado Springs
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The author and Routledge are to be congratulated on a big, beautiful book that many students of the history of sexuality will find alluring." -- Journal of the History of Sexuality
"Imperial Leather is what an academic book ought to be: intelligent, informed, socially committed, engaged, and engaging." -- Women's Review of Books
"Imperial Leather is a wonderful book." -- Women's Review of Books
"McClintock's magisterial study...is a daring articulation of the race-class-gender triad." -- Choice
"Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather takes a prominent place among a number of recent works...that question the relegation of the imperial enterprise to the back benches of the Victorian sensibility...Ms. McClintock's astute reading of novels, diaries, and advertisements, among other sources, demonstrates how images of domestic life can be incorporated into an ideology of imperial domination." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Imperial Leather is a very passionately written book, and the reader cannot help but be involved in the various texts that McClintock freely uses. Nothing escapes her hard, penetrating gaze...The work is thoughtful and well researched. I highly recomend it." -- Journal of Carribean Studies
"This is a big book, in every sense of the word: big format, big ideas, big aim." -- The Canadian Historical Review
"Lucidly written, wide-ranging in its scope, supple and rigorous in its analysis, and impressive in its consistent theorization of gender in relation to other axes of power, Imperial Leather is a major contribution to materialist feminist scholarship." -- Signs
"Engaging and frequently brilliant." -- Victorian Studies
About the Author
Anne McClintock is an Associate Professor of English at Columbia University, and a SSRC-MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of monographs on Simone DeBeauvoir and Olive Schreiner, and has written for a number of publications on issues of gender and sexuality, including Critical Inquiry, Boundary 11, The Village Voice, and The New York Times Book Review.
