Tensions of Empire

Starting with the premise that Europe was made by its imperial projects as much as colonial encounters were shaped by events and conflicts in Europe, the contributors to Tensions of Empire investigate metropolitan-colonial relationships from a new perspective. The fifteen essays demonstrate various ways in which "civilizing missions" in both metropolis and colony provided new sites for clarifying a bourgeois order. Focusing on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, they show how new definitions of modernity and welfare were developed and how new discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion were contested and worked out. The contributors argue that colonial studies can no longer be confined to the units of analysis on which it once relied; instead of being the study of "the colonized," it must account for the shifting political terrain on which the very categories of colonized and colonizer have been shaped and patterned at different times.

Frederick Cooper is Professor of African History at the University of Michigan. His latest book is Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996). Ann Laura Stoler is Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan and author most recently of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995).

Preface
Acknowledgments

Between Metropole and Colony:
Rethinking a Research Agenda
Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper

Part I
Framings
1 Liberal Strategies of Exclusion
Uday S. Mehta
2 Imperialism and Motherhood
Anna Davin
3 Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence
of Colonial Discourse
Homi Bhabha

Part II
Making Boundaries
Contents
4 Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience:
Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa
John L. Comaroff
5 Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers:
European Identities and the Cultural Politics
of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia
Ann Laura Stoler
6 "The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion
of the World Inseparable": Missionary Imperialism
and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain
Susan Thorne
7 Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German
Colonial Empire
Lora Wildenthal

Part III
Colonial Projects
8 "Le bebe en brousse": European Women, African Birth
Spacing, and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding
in the Belgian Congo
Nancy Rose Hunt
9 Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and
Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 190G-1930
Gwendolyn Wright
10 Educating Conformity in French Colonial Algeria
Fanny Colonna

Part IV
Contesting the Categories of Rule
11 The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity:
Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal
Dipesh Chakrabarty
12 The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism
and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa
Frederick Cooper
13 Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology, and Labor
in East and Central Africa
Luise White

Notes on Contributors
Index