Debates about and insurgencies against female circumcision are symptoms of a disease emanating from a mindset that produced hierarchies of humans, conquered colonies, and built empires. The mindset finds its articulation at points of coalescence. Female circumcision provided a point of coalescence and impetus for the articulation. Insisting that the hierarchy on which the imperialist project rests is not bipolar but multi-layered and more complex, the contributions show how imperialist discourses complicate issues of gender, race, and history. Nnaemeka gives voice to the silenced and marginalized, and creates space for them to participate in knowledge construction and theory making.
Gender and colonial space is an analysis of relation between social relations – including notions of class, nationality and gender – and spatial relations, landscape, topography and travel – in post-colonial contexts. .Arguing against much of the psychoanalytic focus of current post-colonial theory, Mills aims to set out in a new direction, drawing on a wide range of literary and non-literary texts to illustrate a more materialist approach. She foregrounds gender in this field where it has often been marginalised by the critical orthodoxies, demonstrating its importance not only in spatial theorising in general, but in the post-colonial theorising of space in particular. .Concentrating on the period of ‘high’ British colonialism at the close of the nineteenth century, she adroitly examines a range of contexts, roving across India, Africa, America, Australia and Britain, illustrating how relations must be analysed for the way in which different colonial contexts define, constitute and re-constitute each other.