Empire’s Old Clothes’ and ‘Making the Empire Respectable’
The books’ Empire’s Old Clothes’ and ‘Making the Empire Respectable’ address the historic factors that were associated with power and means of acquiring power and class. The authors in these books paint the picture of how gender affected one’s power, level of empowerment, and choice. The books are relevant for students who study Anthropology and the instructors of the same course too. The books explain the issues of who rules who and who is to be favored depending on the ideas that had been set by the society during the colonial rule.
Jean Comaroff, the author of The Empire’s Old Clothes, explores how dress played a significant role in choosing the colonial subjects. The essay seeks to know why the British in South Africa, who were aiming at reforming the beliefs of the Africans, used much of their time and their efforts dressing the Africans. Christians had to cloth in attires introduced by the British to show that they are civilized (Stoler, 1989). A way of clothing that was seen as appropriate by the British missions showed a sign of desire and selfhood. The British saw the attire worn by the Africans as unholy, dirty, and low class. Therefore, to raise their standards and be accepted by the British, and to be able to enter heaven, the Africans had to agree to dress up with clothes made by the British. Both men and women worked at the dress factories, but women and children only took the lower and manual jobs like collecting the materials for making the textile. Also, men had different kinds of dressing, while those for women were a uniform making the woman feel a lesser human to man creating social inequalities. Women who refused dressed modestly according to the preference of the Europeans would work hard to make clothes for their female counterparts who accepted the dress code of the colonizers.
Ann Stoler, in the book Respecting the Colonies, explains how the increasing challenges and that Africans and Asians were facing during the European rule made race, gender, and social descriptions central to the rules and regulations used by the Europeans. The colonialists used these aspects to exercise control and scrutiny. The author focuses on French Indochina and the Netherlands Indies and other contexts to examine how one could secure the title of being the colonizer and the colonized through various forms of sexual control. The colonizers used sexual control to define the political interests of the colonialists and how the used culture to identify themselves. The colonial and metropolitan actions regarding social reform, racial discrimination, and health during the colonial period unleash how sexual consents separated the ranks of power. There was to be a clear distinction between who was considered a citizen and who was considered a subject. Since physical attributes like wealth and skin color were ambiguous qualities, the Europeans opted to use the origin of the parent to gain social status. Sexual unions, in any form, either as a wife to a citizen, concubine, prostitute, or domestic worker, could make one rise in the hierarchy of rule. People did this in exchange for gaining a higher class in society and that of her children.
The authors in these essays have displayed aspects like Neo-colonialism, gender and race discrimination, and gendered labor. For instance, only men were allowed to work on the high ranks of the cloth industries in The Empire’s Old Clothes, while women could only work on lower jobs that are more tedious. Neocolonialism is evident in the sense that Africans adopted the dress code that the British introduced to keep up with what is deemed acceptable. Africans could not hold on to their traditional attire since that would mean trouble to them like disrespect, and it is considered ungodly. Since the Europeans considered their race superior, and one could only acquire that superiority through sexual relations and procreation, this shows how racial discrimination is evident in these essays.
