Discourse Analysis in Antoinette Burton’s “
Burdens of
History: British
Feminists, Indian
Women, and
Imperial Culture, 1865-1915”
The British imperial history has long been a fortress of conservative scholarship, its study separated from mainstream British history, its practitioners resistant to engaging with new approaches stemming from the outside – such as
Feminist scholarship, postcolonial cultural studies, social history, and black history. In this light, Antoinette Burton’s Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 represents challenges to the limited vision and exclusivity of standard imperial history.
Burton’s Burdens of History is part of a budding new imperial history, which is characterized by its diversity instead of a single approach. In this book, the
author examines the relationship between liberal middle-class British feminists, Indian women, and imperial culture in the 1865-1915 period. Its primary objective is to relocate “British feminist ideologies in their imperial context and problematizing Western feminists'''' historical relationships to imperial culture at home” (p. 2).
Burton describes Burdens of History as a history of “discourse” (p. 27). By this, she means the history of British feminism, imperialism, orientalism, and colonialism. Throughout the book, the author interposes and synthesizes current reinterpretations of British imperial history, women’s history, and cultural studies that integrate analyses of race and gender in attempts at finding the ideological structures implanted in language. In this book, Burton analyzes a wide assortment of feminist periodicals for the way British feminists fashioned an image of a disenfranchised and passive colonized female “Other”. The impact of the message conveyed was to highlight not a rejection of empire – as modern-day feminists too readily have tended to assume – but a British feminist imperial obligation. According to Burton, empire lives up to what they and many of their contemporaries believed were its purposes and ethical ideals.
Burton based her book on extensive empirical research. Here, she is concerned with the material as well as the ideological and aware of the complexity of historical interpretation. Backed by these, the author particularly examines the relationship between imperialism and women’s suffrage. Burton brings together a remarkable body of evidence to back her contention that women’s suffrage campaigners’ claims for recognition as imperial citizens were legitimated as “an extension of Britain''''s worldwide civilizing mission” (p. 6).
Centering on the Englishwoman''''s Review before 1900 and suffrage journals post 1900, the author finds an imperialized discourse that made British women’s parliamentary vote and emancipation imperative if they were to “shoulder the burdens required of imperial citizens” (p. 172). The author shows in Burdens of History how Indian women were represented as “the white feminist burden” (p. 10) as “helpless victims awaiting the representation of their plight and the redress of their condition at the hands of their sisters in the metropole” (p. 7).
Responding both on the charge that white feminists need to address the method of cultural analysis pioneered by Edward Said and the imperial location and racial assumptions of historical feminisms, Burton explores the images of Indian women within Victorian and Edwardian feminist writing. In her analysis, the author argues that Indian women functioned as the ideological “Other” within such texts, their presence serving to authorize feminist activities and claims.
By creating an image of tainted Oriental womanhood, and by presenting enforced widowhood, seclusion, and child marriage as “the totality of Eastern women''''s experiences” (p. 67), British feminists insisted on their own superior emancipation and laid claim to a wider imperial role. However, while feminists persistently reiterated their respon
More reviews about the Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915