Of Property and Propriety: The Role of Gender and Class in Imperialism and Nationalism

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and co-author of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–

This book uses case studies from Finland, India, Ireland, and Kurdistan
to explore colonialism and movements against it in Europe and Asia.
Adopting a materialist approach to their task, the six authors published
here take issue with postcolonial and poststructural theorists who, they
claim, tend to ignore class, caste, and gender in their analyses. The
result of treating the history of imperialism as a struggle between the
West and the Rest, the editors argue, is that it erases the differences
between nationalist movements that, in practice, deploy starkly
different approaches to the way women and the lower classes are
positioned with respect to wealth (property) and gender relations
(propriety).

In the opening essay, Himani Bannerji critiques subaltern studies as
represented in Partha Chatterjee’s book Nationalism and Its Fragments
(1993), arguing that revivalist and liberal-national movements continue
to exclude women and the poor from full citizenship, while
national-liberationist approaches to decolonization often have a more
enlightened agenda for the dispossessed. This insight lays the
groundwork for several case studies that address issues as diverse as
the complex interaction between feminism and nationalism in
pre-independence Ireland, the history of gender relations in Kurdistan,
the regulation of prostitution in colonial Madras, representations of
women and the Sami (Lapps) in Finnish folklore, and female sexuality in
18th-century Maharastra.

The strength of the collection lies in its rigorous feminist and
materialist theoretical frameworks and the potential for wide-ranging
comparative analysis. These strengths are also its weakness. Since the
materialist/feminist turn can be as difficult to negotiate as the
linguistic one, some of the analysis becomes hard to follow, and the
comparative potential has a tendency to get lost in the broad reach
across time and place. Nevertheless, this book yields plenty of food for
thought for scholars advancing the multidisciplinary field of
ethnography, and the individual case studies, which offer important new
research and exciting ways of thinking about old topics, often make
compelling reading.