Colonial Desire

In this study, the author argues that today's theories on post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the 19th century. He shows how culture has always carried within it an inner dissonance, and 'Englishness' has always been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured by difference and a longing for otherness. At the heart of Victorian racial theory, this re-emerges in the form of colonial desire: an obsession with hybridity, focused explicitly on sexuality and the issue of inter-racial unions. This book breaks new ground in analysing how concepts of culture get formed, and how racialized assumptions continue to pervade them.