Sara Mills.2005. Gender and Colonial Space. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 

Sara Mills's work is known to post-colonial scholars largely through her book Discourses of Difference (1991) in which she analysed selected women's travel writings during the period of high imperialism. She has since published in the fields of feminist linguistics and feminist post-colonial analysis (1996; 2003).

In Gender and Colonial Space, Mills returns to the late nineteenth century and British imperialism but this time focuses her attention specifically on gendered, raced and classed spatial relations. She looks at a range of colonial contexts - India, Africa, America, Australia and 'Britain-as-Home' - in order to demonstrate "why spatial relations cannot be examined in isolation" (2005:1). Her theoretical approach is similarly comparative and plural - she voices dissatisfaction with mainstream psychoanalytical post-colonial theory in favour of materialist feminist theory informed by Foucauldian discourse theory. Mills is at pains to make transparent her positioning in relation to her current project: it is important to her that her work is "politically committed" (2005:6), and she cites Ann McClintock's work on South African literature as a

good indicator of the direction that current theory needs to take in order

to be able to articulate a politics and a form of analysis which is able

to deal with the specificities of particular colonial contexts. (2005:10)

In illustrating the "specificities" of colonial contexts, Mills uses a wide range of primary texts written throughout the English-speaking colonial world, including travellers' texts, dictionaries, household management books and official documents. The chapters offer a similarly eclectic range of 'snapshots.' Chapter two explores how colonial subjectivity, gender and space are inextricably interlinked and co-influential: "gender shapes the possible parameters of the possible structures within which writers construct their work" (2002:98); Chapter three summarises colonial positioning in terms of landscape viewing; Chapter four discusses colonial architecture primarily in India - public spaces such as the Civil Lines, the durbar, the compound; and domestic spaces such as the bungalow, garden, and hill station; Chapter five shifts to indigenous spatiality in the colonial Australian sphere for the most part. The conclusion moves to modern British women's travel writing; Mills suggests that colonial constructions of subjectivity still have profound impact today on how men and women see themselves in world affairs. She notes that, ironically, colonial women had greater recourse to the 'adventure hero' position, ambivalent as that might have been for women of the time, than do contemporary travellers (such as Ffyona Campbell's account of her walk around the world) who tend to adopt a self-deprecatory tone: "the moment of supreme confidence when faced with an alien landscape has passed" (2005:162).

In her introduction, Mills comments that her book's chapters "circle around the question of the process by which spatial relations are constituted" (2005:40). This circling around aptly points to my sense of the book as touching on a number of issues in its orbit, but not sustaining its focus on them enough to satisfy my curiosity. This is richly suggestive work in the references it makes to gendered, raced and classed spatial design, architecture, colonial custom, indigenous knowledge and landscape aesthetics, yet it needs a strongly sustaining narrative to link its parts together. Perhaps this disjointedness is a product of the numerous subdivisions in each chapter, subdivisions designed to assist the reader but actually contributing to a fragmented reading experience. Thus, for example, the chapter on indigenous spatiality moves from a fascinating six pages on cannibalism in Daisy Bates's 1938 account of living with Aboriginal Australians, to three pages on the seclusion of indigenous women in India - both sections call for a teasing out of points and authorial linking. On a larger scale, the book moves from an analysis of colonial architecture (the strongest chapter in the book, published originally as an article) to indigenous spatial relations in Australia.

Perhaps the obvious linking thread, given the book's title, could have been a discussion of gender and its impact on how colonial women and men constructed place and spatial relations both public and domestic, colonial and indigenous; and the many interminglings of these supposed (and yet not) binary opposites. Mills, however, is still defining her use of gender half way through the book:

'Gender' is a term which I will be using in a relational way, that is to

say, the very fact of discussing 'women's' writing only makes sense in

relation to a body of work which is labeled 'men's' writing, and those

elements which are coded as stereotypically 'feminine' and 'masculine'

within those works. (2005:98)

Such clarification needs to come earlier for the reader to make the connections required within the fragmentary nature of the subdivided chapters.

This having been said, however, Gender and Colonial Space provides plenty of food for thought and directions to pursue for future researchers. This is aided by a comprehensive bibliography as befits Mill's wide-ranging references to colonial contexts and issues. She ends powerfully by returning to the political concerns raised at the beginning of her book:

I feel it is essential to track down just how much of what we think of as our contemporary values and beliefs about spatiality stems from fairly unreconstructed and anachronistic colonial attitudes about Britain's position in the world and Britain as a multicultural nation. (2005:171)