Body and Gender in the Age of European Hegemony

A woman, almost saintly, dispenses justice (or is it healing?) to other women. She is draped in white and red, fully clothed and diminutive, quite white, while the others are mostly brown, nude and buxom. Only off to the side do men appear, clothed in their ethnic costumes. Rather than bodies on display, they are engaged in their various tasks, looking away from the women and from the viewer. “Over this crowd from Babel, swarming and guttural, over the palaces and the huts in the billowing Vincennes greenery, the tricolor flag snaps in the pale sky, the symbol of the unity of the French Colonial Empire.” Journalists thus rhapsodized the opening of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 in Paris. Pierre Ducos de la Haille (1889-1972) painted the scene at the entry to the expo’s only permanent building. Spread across three floor-to-ceiling frescoes, Haille titled the piece France Offering the Dove of Peace to Five Continents.         

It is the historian’s privilege and burden to note the irony of that confidence, so arrogantly expressed not even a generation after the truly global blood bath of World War One, not even a generation before the European Empires imploded. In addition to a print poster, this presentation will include a rotating band of images juxtaposed in disturbing and compelling ways. For example, an image of Vietnamese laborers toiling on a rubber plantation will follow Haille’s oeuvre.

Over 80 images and maps reveal complex negotiations of power between colonized and colonizer on every continent in the era of European Hegemony (1750-1960). Drawn from my new co-authored book, Intimate Empires: Body, Race, and Gender in the Modern World (OUP 2016), this visually enriched narrative untangles the embodied experiences and representations of people in intimate spaces, including sexual relationships and sex-work; infant care and childrearing; cookery and clothing; fitness and racial fitness. Often disempowered legally, ordinary people ignored, survived, co-opted, or even subverted imperialists and their institutions in the intimate sphere. At the same time, imperialism as an ideology produced modern gender and race identities, hardening in proportion to proliferating anxieties about the fluidity of these identities. The resulting prohibitions against certain foods and clothing, and of physical contact, for example, led to the reorganization of space from the creation of hill stations to the segregation of neighborhoods and institutions.

Postcolonial authors from Assia Djebar to Ashis Nandy have long located the processes and legacies of colonization in the body. An explosion of scholarship on gender and empire followed the lead of Ann Laura Stoler, Nancy Rose Hunt, and Antoinette Burton, all of whom traced the ways in which “bodies in contact” suffered, assimilated, disappeared or thrived under European imperialism. By making these processes visual on every continent and over 200 years, this poster conveys the globality of European-dominated intimacies. In addition, a timeline of markers of intimate life (marriages, births, bodies displayed at world’s fairs), will be layered over conventional timelines complicating viewers’ assumptions about hegemonic control over body, race and gender in the modern era.