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Workshop / Lecture / Graduate Reading Seminar
Co-converners:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Center for European Studies; Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Department of Women’s Studies; Department of History; Initiative for Transoceanic 18th and 19th-Century Studies (TOS); Institute for the Studies of the Americas) and Duke University (Women's Studies Program; Department of History).
Organizers:
Chad Bryant, Karen Hagemann (UNC, Department of History), Emily Burrill (UNC, Curriculum in Women’s Studies), and the UNC Graduate Student Group on Gender History.
Contact: Karen Hagemann
Workshop: Gender and Empire – Comparative Perspectives
Friday and Saturday, March 26 - 27, 2010
At the UNC Institute for the Arts & Humanities, Hyde Hall
Literature, art and movies often represent colonization and the formation of empires as male adventure stories. Maleness certainly was constitutive of the imperial enterprise, but as gender historians have long emphasized, imperial maleness needed constant confirmation and substantiation. Historians of empire have observed the same characteristics for colonial rule, which too constantly needed to be confirmed and legitimated, because of the permanent fear that colonial and racial prestige—and power—might be undermined. Colonial discourses on gender seems to be one of the spaces were the instability of the empires and its power structures is most visible. Competing concepts of masculinity and femininity were central to colonial order, but they cannot be understood in isolation. Rather, they need to be historicized and contextualized. They were constructed in close interplay with other categories of difference like race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and religion and created sexual, racial, and national hierarchies, which challenged or stabilized imperial rule during the nineteenth and twentieth century. They also challenge historians to think comparatively about empires and to ask what constitutes an empire.
In the workshop we will explore the complex connections between gender and empire in a comparative perspective. We will contrast British colonial rule in North America, the Caribbean and India; French rule in the Caribbean and Africa; Habsburg rule in Central-Eastern Europe; the Spanish Empire and its rule in Latin America; and the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East during the long nineteenth century. In our comparison we want to study the specific characteristics of the different empires and the function of the gender order for their rule in the colonies. We will discuss the deployment of femininities and masculinities that justified imperial rule and attempted to establish clear lines of demarcation between ruler and ruled. We will analyze the ambiguities and contradictions of colonial relationships across genders and look at colonial policies that regulated these gender relations and how they transformed over time. Finally, we will analyze the ways in which processes of decolonization and nation-building were influenced by the gendered legacies of imperialism.
Program
Friday, March 26, 2010
1:00 pm
Registration and Welcome Coffee
2:00 pm
Welcome
Karen Hagemann (UNC at Chapel Hill)
2:15 – 3:30 pm
Catherine Hall (University College London)
Complicating Emipre: Sierra Leone, Jamaica, India
This paper will draw on material from three sites of the British Empire - Sierra Leone, a laboratory for free labor in the 1790s, Jamaica, the richest of the British Caribbean sugar islands at the time of emancipation in 1834, and India, a central focus of reforming visions of empire in the 1830s - to reflect on the significance and specificity of gender relations in different colonial contexts. How are we to think about the local and the global? How important were metropolitan visions of a colonial gender order? How vital was the family, in its different manifestations, to the workings of empire? How much did gender matter?
Chair: Karen Hagemann (UNC at Chapel Hill)
Coffee Break
4:00 – 5:00 pm
Adele Perry (University of Manitoba)
Intimacies and North American Empires:
Re-Reading Gender and Empire through the Connolly-Douglas Family
This paper will draw on my ongoing research into the extended families of James Douglas (1803-1877) and Amelia Connolly (1812-1890) to access the last two decades of scholarship on gender and imperialism and its historiographical purchase for scholars of northern North America. Connolly and Douglas were a married couple at the centre of an elite, Creole family who moved between the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and a range of sites in Northern North America, most notably Red River, Oregon, and British Columbia. They played a significant, if sometimes largely symbolic, role in the early scholarship on women and the fur-trade. Returning to their story makes clear the analytic power of the rich scholarship on gender and colonialism that has been crafted in the last few decades. It also suggests some of the ways that this scholarship might be pushed and modified. The history of the Connolly-Douglas family reminds us of the need to situate North America in transnational terms, to register the significance of different modes of imperialism to the history of gender, and to be alert to the enduring and complicated work that affect, emotion and kinship played in lived experience of empire.
Chair: Susan Thorne (Duke University)
Coffee Break
5:30 – 6:30 pm
Asunción Lavrin (Arizona State University)
Gender in Spanish Colonial America
The paper will review the current historiography to assess the state of the art. Given the fact the gender studies are of very recent vintage in Spanish American historiography, I will look at some sources in greater depth to analyze the discourse of gender as prescribed by law, and as interpreted by custom. The colonial period stretched for three centuries and it is pressing to identify any changes due to the passing of time and the increasing complexity of the racial and social configuration of the empire. The continental nature of the Spanish empire poses questions as to potential regional variations in the understanding of gender relations. Religion was an equally important factor in the construction of gender values given the predominance of the Roman Catholic religion as the official religion of the empire and the choice of religious life for men and women as an alternative to secular life. At the end of the eighteenth century most people could or would not predict a struggle for independence. The nature of gender relations in 1810 would cast a shadow on the republican period for at least several decades. A final assessment of the legacy of gender construction in the colonial period at its chronological end may be useful not only to interpret the cultural heritage of Spanish America but also to compare it with other more recent colonial experiences world wide.
Chair: Cynthia Radding (UNC at Chapel Hill)
Reception
Dinner for the speakers
Saturday, March 27, 2010
9:30 – 10:30 am
Laurent Dubois (Duke University)
Culture, Empire and Gender in the French Antilles
This paper will examine the place of gender in the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique through investigation of a few core examples from different time periods: the 1790s, the decades leading up to abolition in 1848, and the decades since departmentalization in 1946. I will pay particular attention to the intersections between social and political structures and cultural production – theatre, literature, music, education, and sport – in order to think through some of the ways in which gender shapes empire and vice versa in the particular context of the French Antilles.
Chair: Lloyd Kramer (UNC at Chapel Hill)
Coffee Break
11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Emily Burrill (UNC at Chapel Hill)
Gender and Empire in French Colonial Africa: The View from Mali
This paper will begin with a historiographical overview of how scholars have treated the subject of gender in the history of francophone Africa. How has the cultural turn and the recent rise of “new imperial histories” in French historical studies intersected with African history’s long tradition of economic and materialist examinations of women and inequity? How – if at all – have the interventions of African historians directed or impacted this historiography? The paper will conclude with a discussion of the presenter’s own “notes from the field” on a current research project that examines the politics and discourse on marriage reform in French Soudan/Mali, and how these historical transformations are tied to gendered citizenship claims, visions of the relationship between the family and the state, the relationship between secularism, “political Islam” and African feminism, and tensions over human rights and international development’s place in local political struggle.
Chair: Lisa Lindsay (UNC at Chapel Hill)
Lunch
1:00 – 2:00 pm
Maureen Healy (Oregon State University)
Ladies and Gentlemen in the Balkans: Habsburg Imperial Ambitions in Bosnia
In the final decades of its existence the Habsburg state embarked on what has been called a “colonial” mission in the Balkans. This paper explores the gendered dimensions of that mission, the occupation and eventual annexation of Bosnia between the years 1878- 1918. It looks at the ways that Austro-Hungarian men described their own administrative work (rational, dispassionate, altruistic, technologically competent) and the nature of the society they sought to administer (static, passive, feminized). Using the memoirs and travel writings of civil servants the paper interprets “administration” as a key attribute of late imperial Habsburg masculinity and sheds light on the gendered dimensions of late imperial Habsburg rule.
Chair: Claudia Koonz (Duke University)
Coffee Break
2:30 – 3:30 pm
Beth Baron (CUNY Graduate School, Center for Middle East Studies)
Reproducing the Ottoman Empire: The Vice Regal Harem of Egypt
The Ottoman Empire proved to be one of the largest and longest lasting world empires, covering at its height a large swath of territory at the intersection of Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Ottoman dynasty at the heart of the empire was reproduced in the imperial harem, an institution, which relied on the importation of slave concubines primarily from the Caucasus and domestic slave labor from eastern Africa. That harem, in turn, was reproduced in provinces throughout the empire. This paper focuses on the most impressive nineteenth century provincial copy, the vice regal harem of Ottoman Egypt. It explores how the Pasha’s harem literally reproduced the Mehmed Ali family and figuratively reproduced the unique gender order that helped define the Ottoman Empire.
Chair: Akram Khater (NC State University)
Coffee Break
4:00 – 5:30 pm
Final Roundtable: Comparing Empires in a Gendered Perspective
Chairs: Chad Bryant (UNC at Chapel Hill) and Ranjana Khanna (Duke University)
Participants:
Registration is necessary. The deadline for registration is: March 15, 2010.
Please send an email to: Sarah Summers.
Registration fee: Faculty: $ 25 / Grad. Students: $ 15 (to be paid by check with the registration) (for coffee breaks, reception and lunch)
For more information contact Karen Hagemann.
Workshop assistants:
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