Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's 'History of Sexuality' and the Colonial Order of Things.

Ann Laura Stoler. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 237 pp.

As suggested by their respective tides, these two books address a number of similar issues in colonial studies, albeit from different perspectives. Departing from the traditional approach that views categories of "colonizer" and "colonized" as givers, both authors undertake to demonstrate that colonialism is, in fact, a project through which the nineteenth-century European middle class sought to constitute its class identity by laying down a number of class markers. One of the main features of this project was, McClintock and Stoler argue, the cult of domesticity diet "was crucial in helping to fashion the identity of a large class of people (hitherto disunited) with clear affiliations, distinct boundaries and separate values--organized around the presiding domestic values of monogamy, thrift, order, accumulation" (McClintock 167-68). This same argument is made by Stoler, who points out that far from being a secure bourgeois project, colonialism "was not only about the importation of middle-class sensibilities to the colonies, but about the making of them" (99). Among the myriad forms assumed by the cult of domesticity in imperial politics, one which both authors identify as all abiding, is the discourse on the family in its promotion of the …