Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma

Saha, Jonathan

doi:10.1080/14780038.2017.1329125

Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma

Saha, Jonathan

Authors

Professor Jonathan Saha jonathan.saha@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

When British judges in colonial South Asia attempted to perform their duties with detached objectivity they were also performatively enacting a particular construction of imperial white masculinity. This was an ambivalent embodied enactment. When the figure of the objective judge was confronted by critics as white and male, its claims to be objective were under threat. As a result of this ambivalence, it was an imperial white masculinity that could not name itself. Instead, it was a white masculinity constructed through a differentiation that was made with feminised, non-white bodies that were deemed partial.

Citation

Saha, J. (2017). Whiteness, Masculinity and the Ambivalent Embodiment of ‘British Justice’ in Colonial Burma. Cultural and Social History, 14(4), 527-542. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2017.1329125

Journal Article Type	Article
Online Publication Date	May 19, 2017
Publication Date	2017
Deposit Date	Sep 2, 2020
Publicly Available Date	Oct 25, 2021
Journal	Cultural and Social History
Print ISSN	1478-0038
Electronic ISSN	1478-0046
Publisher	Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	14
Issue	4
Pages	527-542
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2017.1329125

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© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.