Double Crossings

In her University of British Columbia Sedgwick Lecture for 2000, Professor Anne McClintock ranges from England to America, to the Congo and South Africa, and from the early nineteenth century to the present. She reveals the connections among gender, race and madness created by the dominant power centers. In her examples, she is equally at home with the short story writer Bessie Head, the novelists Charlotte Bronte and Joseph Conrad and the psychoanalyst Carl Jung—as well as with the many commercial advertisements from the nineteenth century that conjoin whiteness and moral superiority. While fascinated by the ways in which the self, nation and race are constructed in discourse, McClintock also asks us to move beyond discourse studies to investigate the actual people who bore the marks of imperial legislation on their bodies.