Empires, Boundaries, and the Body: The Obscene as a Problem of Imperial Hygiene

Empires, as inherently transnational and globalizing phenomena, have historically served to fracture the boundaries between ‘inner' and ‘outer,' ‘self' and ‘other,' and ‘home' and ‘empire.' Such processes of boundary disorder increased in the second half of the nineteenth century with the expansion of the material and discursive networks of empires. In an age when nations were first imagined somatically, as gendered and racialized bodies, and individual bodies were conceptualized in political terms, as waging battles against external enemies, the movement of ever larger numbers of bodies through such networks served to generate particularly potent fears about the effects of such boundary disorder in maintaining the strength and ‘purity' of the individual, national and imperial body. The response to such boundary disorder by imperial and colonial regimes was therefore to reconfigure the boundaries of rule through which they operated. Focusing on the crisis of boundary disorder generated in the British empire by the dissemination of ‘obscene' publications through imperial networks—which were not only conceived of as ‘foreign bodies' but were believed to undermine the boundaries of the self-contained body and render it impure—this paper will explore, firstly, how the British sought to reconfigure such boundaries through constructing a cordon sanitaires around national and ultimately imperial space in an effort to protect their bodily integrity. The difficulty for Britain, however, was that its colonies such as India and Australia were engaged in their own nationalist projects to regulate obscenity, which while largely derived from Britain's came to construct the imperial metropole as a key source of their ‘impurity' and ‘degeneration.' Such a project thus ultimately led to a reformulation of the boundaries through which Britain's colonial subjects—in both settler and exploitation colonies—constructed strategies of resistance.