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 Groszââ"šÂ¬Ã¢"žÂ¢s point that ââ"šÂ¬Ã…"the body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophical thought and contemporary feminist theory.ââ"šÂ¬Ã‚Â3 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 ââ"šÂ¬Ã…"the most intimate colonyââ"šÂ¬Ã‚ (410) enmeshed in networks of cross-cultural interaction.