Satadru Sen, ‘Re-Orienting Whiteness, and: The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region’ (review), Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 11, 3 (2010).

Excerpts:

Both volumes reviewed here take off from what has now become a familiar launching point for studies of whiteness: Ann Stoler’s contention that modern concepts of race and gender, including metropolitan assumptions, were profoundly shaped by colonial experiences. They reflect, at the same time, Homi Bhabha’s assertion that whiteness is a ‘strategy of authority.’ Not surprisingly, the editors and contributors in each case focus on situations of anxiety and represent colonialism as a set of productive anxieties brought about by new configurations of power: the imperial redistribution of bodies and identities, climates and terrains, homes and neighbors.

[…]

In The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia, as in Re-Orienting Whiteness, the authors chase elusive color lines, including the fissures within white identity. Here also, the editors aim to examine British colonialism ‘in a transnational light,’ focusing on the Indian Ocean region, subaltern subjects (or, at any rate, objects), and sea-borne networks of disorder and attempted-orders. They too attempt to move away from slaves and indentured labor, but instead of looking at settlers, they focus on sailors, racial ‘low-life’ and criminalized populations.