Antoinette M. Burton

"This volume is designed to introduce readers to the scholarly field of gender history: its origins, development, reception, recalibrations, and frictions. It offers a set of working definitions of gender as a descriptive category and as a category of historical analysis, tracing the emergence, usage, and applicability of these entwined subjects across a range of times and places in the scholarship of the last five decades. Inevitably political, gender history has taken aim at the broader field of historical narrative by asking who counts as a historical subject and what difference gender difference makes. The book explores gender history as a practice of subverts reigning assumptions of what power, culture, economics, and identity have been in the past - with ramifications, of course, for what they are today"--

A Very Short Introduction

Gender History

Antoinette Burton focuses on the experiences of three Victorian travelers in Britain to illustrate how "Englishness" was made and remade in relation to imperialism. The accounts left by these three sojourners--all prominent, educated Indians--represent complex, critical ethnographies of "native" metropolitan society and offer revealing glimpses of what it was like to be a colonial subject in fin-de-siècle Britain. Burton's innovative interpretation of the travelers' testimonies shatters the myth of Britain's insularity from its own construction of empire and shows that it was instead a terrain open to continual contest and refiguration. Burton's three subjects felt the influence of imperial power keenly during even the most everyday encounters in Britain. Pandita Ramabai arrived in London in 1883 seeking a medical education and left in 1886, having resisted the Anglican Church's attempts to make her an evangelical missionary. Cornelia Sorabji went to Oxford to study law and became the first Indian woman to be called to the Bar. Behramji Malabari sought help for his Indian reform projects in England, and subjected London to colonial scrutiny in the process. Their experiences form the basis of this wide-ranging, clearly written, and imaginative investigation of diasporic movement in the colonial metropolis.

Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain

At the Heart of the Empire

Professor of History Antoinette Burton

Through an analysis of the writings of three 20th century Indian women, Dwelling in the Archive explores how memoirs, fictions, and histories written by women can be read as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Burton discusses how memories of the physical space of houses and the emotive attachment to home can be used to understand women's reactions to partition and the creation of the Indian nation.

Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India

Dwelling in the Archive

While imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, there is no comprehensive history dedicated to resistance in the 19th and 20th century British Empire. The Trouble with Empire is the first volume to fill this gap, offering a brief but thorough introduction to the nature and consequences of resistance to British imperialism. Historian Antoinette Burton's study spans the 19th and 20th centuries, when discontented subjects of empire made their unhappiness felt from Ireland to Canada to India to Africa to Australasia, in direct response to incursions of military might and imperial capitalism. The Trouble with Empire offers the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was throughout its long, unstable life. By taking the long view, moving across a variety of geopolitical sites and spanning the whole of the period 1840-1955, Burton examines the commonalities between different forms of resistance and unveils the structural weaknesses of the British Empire.0.

Challenges to Modern British Imperialism

The Trouble with Empire

In this study of British middle-class feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Antoinette Burton explores an important but neglected historical dimension of the relationship between feminism and imperialism. Demonstrating how feminis

Antoinette M. Burton

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