I'm teaching a graduate course in spring 2017 called "Writing Empire: Race, Gender, and Power in British India."
This course will explore 19th and early 20th century texts related to British colonialism with an "intersectional" lens. Broad questions to be considered include: What role did liberal 19th century British feminism play in helping to consolidate -- or critique -- an ideology of British Imperialism? How can we understand the early Indian nationalist movement specifically with regards to the representation of Hindu and Muslim women? How do interracial relationships and cross-cultural structures of desire and intimacy factor into the history of the later unraveling of the British Empire? To address these questions, we will introduce ideas from postcolonial theory and specifically postcolonial feminism, and apply them to a set of primary readings that includes both well-known authors like Rudyard Kipling, Wilkie Collins, and E.M. Forster, as well as more marginal figures like Flora Annie Steel and Pandita Ramabai. In addition to primary texts, a portion of the course will introduce students to research methods in order to access archival materials related to the British empire; this archival unit will also entail some digital humanities concepts and methods.
Likely Primary Texts (we may not do *all* of these):
Secondary Criticism (Preliminary list -- mostly supplementary/optional reading)
(Excerpts from these available on CouresSite)
Victorian/ Postcolonial
Gender and Race
Poverty and Famine
Rudyard Kipling
E.M. Forster
In addition to regular primary and secondary readings for the course, I'll encourage students to seek out an archival project on a thematic topic related to the intersection of race & gender in Victorian India. This could be an exploration of newspaper archives related to a particular hot-button issue picked out by students, such as the "Rukhmabai" issue relating to Hindu child marriage, debates over laws relating to widow remarriage, issues affecting the mixed-race Eurasian population, etc. Students will be asked to conduct a limited amount of archival research on that topic, and then find a productive way to edit and present those materials online, in a digital format. I will use my work on my digital project, "The Kiplings and India," as a model, though students will not be in any way obliged to contribute to that project.
Here's the brief course description.
"Writing Empire: Race, Gender, and Power in British India"
Here's the brief course description.
"Writing Empire: Race, Gender, and Power in British India"
This course will explore 19th and early 20th century texts related to British colonialism with an "intersectional" lens. Broad questions to be considered include: What role did liberal 19th century British feminism play in helping to consolidate -- or critique -- an ideology of British Imperialism? How can we understand the early Indian nationalist movement specifically with regards to the representation of Hindu and Muslim women? How do interracial relationships and cross-cultural structures of desire and intimacy factor into the history of the later unraveling of the British Empire? To address these questions, we will introduce ideas from postcolonial theory and specifically postcolonial feminism, and apply them to a set of primary readings that includes both well-known authors like Rudyard Kipling, Wilkie Collins, and E.M. Forster, as well as more marginal figures like Flora Annie Steel and Pandita Ramabai. In addition to primary texts, a portion of the course will introduce students to research methods in order to access archival materials related to the British empire; this archival unit will also entail some digital humanities concepts and methods.
Likely Primary Texts (we may not do *all* of these):
Rudyard Kipling, Early Poems, Indian journalism, select short stories (The Kiplings and India)
Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales From the Hills (1900) (Gutenberg version)
Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters (1897). (Archive.org version)
Meera Kosambi, Ed., Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter (1889 / translated 2003)
Krupabai Satthianadhan, Kamala: The Story of a Hindu Life (1894) (Archive.org version)
Rabindranath Tagore, Chokher Bali
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868) (Gutenberg version)
Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893) (Archive.org version)
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
E.M. Forster, Biographical materials and India-related essays
Florence Nightingale, Letter on the Madras Famine of 1876 (5 page famine report)
Secondary Criticism (Preliminary list -- mostly supplementary/optional reading)
(Excerpts from these available on CouresSite)
Victorian/ Postcolonial
Patrick Brantlinger, Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2009)Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (2003)
Nathan Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016)
Tim Watson, "The Colonial Novel" (from The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel)
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993)
Gender and Race
Indrani Sen, Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India 1858-1900. (2002)
Shuchi Kapila, Educating Seeta: The Ango-Indian Family Romance and the Poetics of Indirect Rule (2010)
Krupa Shandilya, Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian Novel. (2017)
LeeAnne Richardson, New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire. (2006)
Claire Midgley, Gender and Imperialism (1998)
Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850-1920 (2005)
Poverty and Famine
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (2002), Chapter 1
Leela Sami, "Starvation, Disease and Death: Explaining Famine Mortality in Madras 1876–1878" (2011)
Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (2010). Chapter on Dadaji Naoroji's "Poverty and Un-British Rule""
Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine (1997). Chapter 4, "Literature of the Bengal Famine"
Louise Penner, Victorian Medicine and Social Reform: Florence Nightingale Among the Novelists (2010). Chapter 4: "Engaging the Victorian Reading Public: Nightingale and the Madras Famine of 1876
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981). Chapter 6: "The Great Bengal Famine.""Appendix D: Famine Mortality: A Case Study"
Meghnad Desai, "The Economics of Famine" (in Harrison, Ed. Famine [1988])
William Digby, Famine Campaign in Southern India, 1876-1878. (1878). Digital Copy on Hathi Trust
B.M. Bhatia, Famines in India: A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India (1963). Chapter 3: "Famines and Famine Relief, 1860-1879"
Rudyard Kipling
Zohreh Sullivan, Narratives of Empire : The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (1993)
Charles Allen, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling (2008)
Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India (Chapters 5 and 6)
Jan Montefiore, "Kipling's North Indian Travels" (From In Time's Eye)
Harish Trivedi, "Kipling's 'Vernacular': what he knew of it -- and what he made of it" (From In Time's Eye)
Don Randall, Kipling's Imperial Boy: Adolescence and Cultural Hybridity (Introduction)
Thomas Pinney, Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-1888. (Introduction)
Flora Annie Steel
Violet Powell, Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India (1981)
David Wayne Thomas, "Liberal Legitimation and Communicative Action in British India: Reading Flora Annie Steel's 'On the Face of the Waters'" (ELH 76.1: 2009, pp. 153-187)
E.M. Forster
Jenny Sharpe, "The Unspeakable Limits of Civility: A Passage to India"
Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoversies: India in the British Imagination
P. N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life
Antony Copley, A Spiritual Bloomsbury: Hinduism and Homosexuality in the Lives and Writings of Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood
Parminder Kaur Bakshi, Distant Desire: Homoerotic Codes and the Subversion of the English Novel in E.M. Forster's Fiction.
Sara Suleri, "Forster's Imperial Erotic." in The Rhetoric of English India.
Bagchi, Barnita. "'Because Novels Are True, And Histories Are False': Indian Women Writing Fiction In English, 1860-1918." A History of the Indian Novel in English. 59-72. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2015.
Stephen Knight, "The Postcolonial Crime Novel" (from The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel)