Ebook: Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire

A fascinating study of ''the inevitable intimacy between colonizer and colonized,'' Effeminism: The Economy of Colonial Desire attempts to chart the flow of colonial desire by examining the complex encodings of fears, fascinations, and anxieties in the works of British writers in India. The author examines the works of Flora Annie Steel, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster, and finds their works to be deeply implicated in the politics of colonial rule and anticolonial resistance. Krishnaswamy refuses to characterize the colonial encounter in terms of unchanging and monolithic Manichean oppositions, repeatedly drawing attention to fissures, contradictions, and slippages that attend the production of English manliness and Indian effeminacy. By restoring both the political in the unconscious and the unconscious in the political, the book proposes to understand colonialism in terms of historical failure, ideological inadequacy, and political contention.