Title: Gender Politics and Post-colonial Writing in Annamarie Jagose’s Slow Water

Abstract: Annamarie Jagose’s novel Slow Water is a neo-Victorian novel based on the colonial history of the British Empire in New Zealand. As a modern novelist, Jagose presents and reconstructs an eclipsed historical event which happened in Victorian age, revealing how the British Empire applied gender politics to bring men and women together in the colonial endeavors. More importantly, the novel reveals how imperial colonial culture defined by “hyper-masculinity,” influenced and reshaped the inner world of the people during colonial period, inflicting incurable psychological trauma on both the colonizer and the colonized.

Keywords: Slow Water, post-colonial, gender politics, “hyper-masculinity”

Author: Min Tan, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin, China.