Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan

Amazon.com Price: $38.95 (as of 05/05/2019 19:50 PST- Details)

Description

Civilizing Women is a riveting exploration of the disparate worlds of British colonial officers and the Muslim Sudanese they sought to remake into brand new imperial subjects. Specializing in efforts to prevent female circumcision within the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan between 1920 and 1946, Janice Boddy mines colonial documents and popular culture for ethnographic details to interleave with observations from northern Sudan, where women’s participation in zâr spirit possession rituals provided an oblique counterpoint to colonial views.

Written in engaging prose, Civilizing Women concerns the subtle process of “colonizing selfhood,” the British women who undertook it, and those they was hoping to reform. It suggests that efforts to suppress female circumcision were tied to the continuation of slavery and the upward push of commercial cotton growing in Sudan, in addition to to concerns about infant mortality and maternal health. Boddy traces maneuverings among political officers, teachers, missionaries, and medical team of workers as they pursued their elusive goal, and describes their fraught relations with Egypt, Parliament, the Foreign Workplace, African nationalists, and Western feminists. In doing so, she sounds a cautionary note for latest interventionists who would flout local knowledge and belief.

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Engineering and Transportation » Engineering » Reference » Atlases and Maps » World » Women in History » Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan

Recent Products