Re-writing the turtle's back : gendered bodies in a global age

Review article: Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Durham, Duke University Press, 2005, xii + 445pp. ISBN: 0-8223-3467-4 (pbk). In this timely, engaging and rich collection of essays, Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton re-visit the philosophical pertinence of the position of the body in world history, but from quite a different set of scholarly concerns. Rather than look at the gendered body in the emergence of the making of the world, as it is positioned in many non-Western contexts, the co-editors are interested in historicizing the body in two ways that have become critical concerns for contemporary historiography. First, to address Elizabeth Grosz’s point that “the body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory.”3 The ways in which the gendered body has become disengaged from largely patriarchal Western ontological traditions is essential to understanding its radical potential as a tool of feminist critique. Second, to re-locate the body as the localized site upon which colonial and world histories can speak to each other in a methodological fashion. Above all, as the authors maintain, the body is “the most intimate colony” (410) enmeshed in networks of cross-cultural interaction.