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, including the English journalist William T. Stead, they represented ‘the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin’. 63 More broadly, female icons were central to the depiction of the United States’ imperial mission in Cuba and the Philippines, where Uncle Sam protected feminised symbols of Cuba and the Philippines from the implied sexual violence of Spanish colonial leaders. 64 More unusually, the four national symbols (of
, combined with an unfettered access to the bodies of enslaved women, helped to create a climate in which inter-racial sex was commonplace. As John Stewart noted, neither the presence of a wife nor the traditional boundaries of respectability served to halt these practices. Enslaved women were vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation – rape and sexual violence were endemic. Relationships
of torture, including sexual violence, as part of counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Rhodesia, see Caute, Death of White Rhodesia , p. 139; Ellert, The Rhodesian Front ; Caroline Elkins , Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal end of Empire in Kenya ( London : Pimlico , 2005 ). 202 Oral evidence collected in June 2019 suggests that these stories of castration of white men, particularly in independent African states, were not infrequent among white men in Rhodesia. 203 See Mike Kesby , ‘ Arenas for Control, Terrains of Gender Contestation: Guerrilla
1980s’ studies of sexuality in Victorian London and other cities to questions of contemporary sexual violence and the emerging AIDS crisis, which they made explicit in prologues and epilogues. Critical historians and histories are, of course, concerned implicitly with speaking to the present and the future. Postcolonial critics are often more explicit in that respect, adopting the postcolonial not simply or necessarily as a chronological category – concerned with the period after colonialism – but rather as a political
The stage was always set, then, the powder always dry. When an assault did take place the settlers found all their terrible prophecies come true. And, in fact, some African men did commit sexual violence against white women and children. One must be careful not to exaggerate their numbers – compared to intra-racial and white-on-black assaults, ‘black peril’ cases were extremely rare. But such assaults
India. The fears and mistrust arising from the Mutiny led to a greater social distancing between Anglo-Indians and Indians. The prominence given to gendered and racialized discourses of sexual violence in the aftermath of the rebellion ensured that gender would be an important factor in subsequent debates about the Raj. 62 However, post-Mutiny India also witnessed the first tentative steps towards the
-whites once protests began. Fears of a general uprising, of racial killing and of sexual violence against the white minority nurtured the sense of embattlement and shared interest between colonial authorities, white estate managers and business owners. One consequence was that white employers, settlers and managers took up arms as police auxiliaries and vigilantes whenever industrial unrest erupted. Thus
with sensual sexual imagery. As Burton explained: ‘The gorgeousness is in the imagery not in the language; the words are weak while the sense . . . is strong’. 88 The settings of Burton’s Nights , like the settings of pornographic literature, are abstractions, historically and geographically vague. The mixture of sexual intimacy and sexual violence – Burton’s principal obsessions 89 include bastinado (beating), castration, genital mutilation and rape – mirrors that in contemporary English pornography. 90 Yet
of the African environment than Southern Rhodesia’s. 86 Kennedy also explores the need of settler society to draw strict physical boundaries between settler and native, describing how the threat of African male sexual violence towards European women became a powerful vehicle for expressing fear about contact between the two groups and the dangers of miscegenation. The Kenyan eugenics movement needs
. 21–4; also Lansdowne to Benjamin Jowett, 3 Feb. 1891, Lansdowne England , From Jan. 1891, Letter No. 15. For the use of such suits in litigation, see Jim Masselos, ‘Sexual Property/Sexual Violence: Wives in Nineteenth-Century Bombay’, South Asia Research 12: 2 (Nov. 1992), 81–99. 53 Quoted in