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 asserts its authority. This book examines the representational dynamics of colonizer versus colonized in Henry Rider Haggard's and Rudyard Kipling's African and Indian writing, exploring the interface between the native "other" as reflection and as a point of address. The author employs recent thinking in psychoanalysis, anthropology and colonial discourse to analyze the manner in which fantasy and fabulation is caught up in networks of desire and power. She focuses on the early fictional and travel writing of Haggard and Kipling. Close friends as well as prominent figures of imperial and colonial myth-making, Haggard and Kipling were praised for their presumed knowledge of and alleged ability to speak from within the native cultures of Africa and India. Their fiction attests to a persistent fascination with the visual image of the other in the imaginative reconstruction of costume and body-image.