Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel / Edition 1

by Inderpal Grewal

Overview

Moving across academic disciplines, geographical boundaries, and literary genres, Home and Harem examines how travel shaped ideas about culture and nation in nineteenth-century imperialist England and colonial India. Inderpal Grewal's study of the narratives and discourses of travel reveals the ways in which the colonial encounter created linked yet distinct constructs of nation and gender and explores the impact of this encounter on both English and Indian men and women. Reworking colonial discourse studies to include both sides of the colonial divide, this work is also the first to discuss Indian women traveling West as well as English women touring the East.
In her look at England, Grewal draws on nineteenth-century aesthetics, landscape art, and debates about women's suffrage and working-class education to show how all social classes, not only the privileged, were educated and influenced by imperialist travel narratives. By examining diverse forms of Indian travel to the West and its colonies and focusing on forms of modernity offered by colonial notions of travel, she explores how Indian men and women adopted and appropriated aspects of European travel discourse, particularly the set of oppositions between self and other, East and West, home and abroad.
Rather than being simply comparative, Home and Harem is a transnational cultural study of the interaction of ideas between two cultures. Addressing theoretical and methodological developments across a wide range of fields, this highly interdisciplinary work will interest scholars in the fields of postcolonial and cultural studies, feminist studies, English literature, South Asian studies, and comparative literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822317401
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/14/1996
Series:	Post-Contemporary Interventions Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	298
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)
Lexile:	1670L (what's this?)

About the Author

Inderpal Grewal is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at San Francisco State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

I. English Imperial Culture

1. Home and Harem: Domesticity, Gender, and Nationalism 23

2. Empire and the Movement for Women's Suffrage in Britain 57

3. The Guidebook and the Museum 85

II. Euroimperial Travel and Indian Women

4. The Culture of Travel and the Gendering of Colonial Modernity in Nineteenth-Century India 133

5. Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale: Homes for Women, Feminism, and Nationalism 179

Afterword 230

Notes 233

Bibliography 265

Index 281

Editorial Reviews

"Delineating the complex effects of nineteenth-century colonialism on travel practices along empire, nation, class, and gender lines, Home and Harem is a breakthrough for interdisciplinary feminist scholarship."--Ella Shohat, City University of New York

From the Publisher