White Skin/Black Masks focuses on the fiction and travel writings of Henry Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling. Close friends as well as prominent figures of imperial and colonial myth-making, Haggard and Kipling were praised for their alleged knowledge of and ability to speak from within the "native" cultures of Africa and India. Narrators and characters in their fiction attest to a persistent fascination with the body-image of the "Other." Kipling's fiction in particular deals with disguise and physical transformation through the use of costume. This book addresses the psychic processes of negation, projection and reappropriation in the dynamics of pleasure/unpleasure and mastery/defense found in the work of these two writers. It also seeks to provide a historical context for understanding how these forces emerged from and were played out in contemporary society.

The fascination with exotic cultures and the crossing of cultural boundaries provides some of the most striking ways in which a colonizing culture articulates its self-identity and authority. White Skin/Black Masks employs the most recent thinking in psychoanalysis, anthropology and colonial discourse theory to analyze the manner in which fantasy and fabulation is always caught up in networks of desire and power.