Search results

In the last century, British modernist studies have dealt
increasingly with issues of class and gender. Yet, untill today, hardly
any have scrutinized how race and nation are integral and intersecting
elements in the perspectives of such prominent literary modernists as
T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, or Virginia Woolf. This essay focuses on a
set of six articles written by Woolf between 1931-1932 and titled
The London Scene (1975a), in order to demonstrate how Woolf reclaims
England from "great men" for the common (wo)man. I argue that maintaining
distinctions between demos (the basis for democracy) and ethnos (the basis
of ethnicity) is constitutive of English nationalism. I show how Woolf's
act of reclamation is based simultaneously in an implicit racialization
of the English self that was prevalent in her time. I juxtapose the
views about England of contemporary political and literary figures as
contrasts and comparisons to explicate how Woolf's gender and class
politics is contingent upon her understanding of race that, in turn,
is tied to English culture and nationhood.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Marking Times and Territories -- I FIGURING GENDERS IN THE COLONY AND NATION: NATIVE AND FOREIGN -- Designing Woman, Designing North Borneo -- The Cordon Sanitaire: Mobility and Space in the Regulation of Colonial Prostitution -- Feminizing the City: Gender and Space in Colonial Colombo -- Failure of the Imaginary: Gendered Excess of the Indonesian Nation -- Gender, Paradoxical Space, and Critical Spectatorship in Vietnamese Film: The Works of Dang Nhat Minh -- II TRANSPORTING GENDERS BETWEEN THE VILLAGE AND CITY: REPRESENTATIONS AND RESISTANCES -- Traveling High and Low: Verticality, Social Position, and the Making of Pahari Genders -- Nurturing, Gender Ideologies, and Bangkok's Foodscape -- Place and Displacement: Figuring the Thai Village in an Age of Rural Development -- The City between the Global State: Architecture and the People in Singapore's Gendered Imaginations -- III GENDERING LOCAL-GLOBAL CIRCUITS: LABOR, CAPITAL, AND SUBJECTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE -- South Asian Women in the Gulf: Families and Futures Reconfigured -- Diasporic Alienness and Belonging: Selected Indian-American Cultural Expressions -- Jewish Diaspora through Colonial Spaces: Negotiating Identity and Forging Community -- Unruly Subjects: Cornelia Sorabji and Ravinder Randhawa -- Immigrant Dreams and Nightmares: South Asian Domestic Workers in North America in a Time of Global Mobility -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index