Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism

224 Pages·2010·0.82 MB·English

by  Caroline Rooney, Kaori Nagai (eds.)

Kipling and Beyond
Also by Caroline Rooney:
AFRICAN LITERATURE, ANIMISM AND POLITICS
BOOK UNBINDING: The Ontological Stain
DECOLONISING GENDER: Literature and a Poetics of the Real
Also by Kaori Nagai:
EMPIRE OF ANALOGIES: Kipling, India and Ireland
Kipling and Beyond
Patriotism, Globalisation and
Postcolonialism
Edited by
Caroline Rooney
and
Kaori Nagai
Selection and editorial matter © Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai
Individual chapters © contributors
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-22446-9
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First published 2010 by
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DOI 10.1057/9780230290471
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kipling and beyond : patriotism, globalisation, and postcolonialism / edited
by Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Kipling, Rudyard, 1865–1936— Criticism and interpretation.
2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Globalization in literature.
I. Rooney, Caroline. II. Nagai, Kaori.
PR4857.K46 2010
828'.809—dc22 2010027550
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Notes on Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai
1 Kipling’s Unloved Race: the Retreat from Modernity 18
Benita Parry
2 How ‘The White Man’s Burden’ Lost its Scare-Quotes; or
Kipling and the New American Empire 37
Judith Plotz
3 Empire’s Children 58
Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney
4 The Alterity of Terror: Reading Kipling’s ‘Uncanny’ India 79
Jo Collins
5 Kipling’s Other Burden: Counter-Narrating Empire 101
Rashna B. Singh
6 ‘Arguing with the Himalayas’? Edward Said on
Rudyard Kipling 120
Harish Trivedi
7 ‘Blindness’ and the Idea of the Artist in Rudyard Kipling’s
‘“They”’ and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost 144
Shirley Chew
8 What They Knew of Nation and Empire: Rudyard Kipling
and C. L. R. James 165
Claire Westall
9 Ex-patriotism 185
Ben Grant and Kaori Nagai
Select Bibliography 205
Index 209
v
Acknowledgements
Some of the essays in this collection derive from the Kipling Conference
2007 (7–8 September) held at the University of Kent, organised by Jan
Montefiore and Kaori Nagai. We wish to express our deepest gratitude
for all the help and encouragement we received while editing this col-
lection, especially from Jan Montefiore, Lyn Innes, Julia Borossa and
Sarah Wood. We also wish to thank Ben Grant and Donna Landry for
their invaluable input at the various stages of preparing this collection,
and for carefully reading the introduction. Finally, we wish to thank
Paula Kennedy, Benjamin Doyle and Steven Hall of Palgrave, without
whose suggestions, help and patience this collection would not have
been possible.
vi
Notes on Contributors
Shirley Chew is Emeritus Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial
Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. She has published widely in
the field of literatures from Commonwealth countries and has c o-edited
Unbecoming Daughters of the Empire (1993), Translating Life: Studies in
Transpositional Aesthetics (1999), Re-constructing the Book: Literary Texts in
Transmission (2001) and the Blackwell Concise Companion to Postcolonial
Literature (2010). She is the founding and general editor of Moving
Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings. Her work in progress includes
the Blackwell History of Postcolonial Literature.
Jo Collins teaches in the Cultural Studies and English and American
Literature departments at the University of Kent, UK. Her doctoral
thesis in postcolonial studies examined the use of the uncanny in colo-
nial literature and travel writing, including the work of Kipling and
Conan Doyle. She has co-edited and contributed to a collection of essays
called Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), and has published articles on Freud and Jung, and on
colonial Australian women writers. Besides postcolonial theory, colonial
literature and the uncanny, her interests include trauma literature and
theory, cultural theory and modernity.
Ben Grant teaches at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of
Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire (2009).
Donna Landry is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Professor of
English and American Literature at the University of Kent, UK, and
Director of the Centre for Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century. Her
most recent book is Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English
Culture (2008). With Gerald MacLean, she is co-editor of The Spivak Reader
(1996). With MacLean and Caroline Finkel, she directs the Evliya Çelebi
Ride and Way, a project of historical re-enactment. For the project's
achievements so far, consult the blog: http://www.hoofprinting.blogspot.
com, and the website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/evliya/index.html.
In search of worlds vanished, vanishing, and as yet unknown, Landry
practises hoofprinting as an indispensable mode of historical enquiry.
Kaori Nagai teaches at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of
Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (2006) and has also p ublished
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
articles on British imperial discourses. She is the editor of a journal collec-
tion entitled ‘Dream Writing’ (Journal of European Studies, 2008).
Benita Parry is Emerita Professor (Department of English and
Comparative Literature) at the University of Warwick. Her current research
interests are in understanding the concept of World Literature, Peripheral
Modernisms, and the denigration of Marxism in the Postcolonial dis-
cussion and adjacent fields. Recent publications include ‘Aspects of
Peripheral Modernism’ in Ariel 40(1) (2009), a special issue on Thinking
through Postcoloniality, and ‘Countercurrents and Tensions in Said’s
Critical Practice’, in Emancipation and Representation, ed. Adel Iskandar
and Hakem Rustom (forthcoming 2010).
Judith Plotz is Professor of English at George Washington University
in Washington, DC where she teaches British Romanticism, Children’s
Literature, and Colonial-Postcolonial Studies. A former president of the
Children’s Literature Association, she is the editor of the forthcoming
Penguin edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories and a contributor to the
forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Kipling with an essay on Kipling’s
involvements with the United States. The author of Romanticism and
the Vocation of Childhood, she is currently completing a book, Kipling
and the Little Traditions, about Kipling’s relation to Victorian children’s
literature, to the tradition of the Indian miniature, and to American
popular science.
Caroline Rooney holds a chair in the School of English at the University
of Kent and she acts as the Director for the University of Kent‘s Centre
for Colonial and Postcolonial Research. She is the author of African
Literature, Animism and Politics (2000) and Decolonising Gender (2007).
Her current research, funded by the ESRC and AHRC under the Global
Uncertainties Scheme, is on ‘Radical Distrust’.
Rashna Batliwala Singh received her PhD from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. Singh is the author of The Imperishable Empire:
British Fiction on India and Goodly is Our Heritage: Children's Literature,
Empire, and the Certitude of Character. She has contributed to Asian American
Playwrights: a Biobibliographical Critical Sourcebook and to the Encyclopedia
of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture. An essay on Chinua
Achebe and Joseph Conrad is forthcoming in a collection of essays on
Chinua Achebe. Singh is also the author of scholarly articles and confer-
ence papers on British colonial and postcolonial literatures as well as on
multicultural and pedagogical issues. Currently she teaches at Colorado
College and at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Notes on Contributors ix
Harish Trivedi is Professor of English at the University of Delhi, and
has been visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London.
He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India
(1993, 1995), and has co-edited The Nation across the World (2007, 2008),
Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (2000), Post-colonial
Translation: Theory and Practice (1999), and Interrogating Post-colonialism:
Theory, Text and Context (1996, rpt. 2000, 2006). He is currently editing an
Anthology of Indian Literature in English Translation, 1500 BC to 2000 AD.
Claire Westall teaches in the Department of English and Comparative
Literary Studies at Warwick University, UK where she also completed her
doctoral research on cricket’s place in English and Caribbean literatures.
This comparative study emerged from C. L. R. James’s postc olonial
re-examination of Rudyard Kipling and the relationship between
these authors and imperial culture. Alongside a sustained interest in
Caribbean literature, her research is specifically concerned with literary
and cultural negotiations with national identity and the intersection of
postcolonialism and postcolonial theory with questions of Englishness
and Britishness.