Also by Kaori Nagai: EMPIRE OF ANALOGIES: Kipling, India and Ireland

Transcription

1 Kipling and Beyond

2 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

3 Kipling and Beyond Patriotism, Globalisation and Postcolonialism Edited by Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai

4 Selection and editorial matter Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai Individual chapters contributors Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. 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, Criticism and interpretation. 2. Postcolonialism in literature. 3. Globalization in literature. I. Rooney, Caroline. II. Nagai, Kaori. PR4857.K '.809 dc

5 Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors vi 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

6 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 collection, 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

7 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 co-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 colonial 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: com, and the website: 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 published vii

8 viii Notes on Contributors articles on British imperial discourses. She is the editor of a journal collection 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 discussion 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 conference 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.

9 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 (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 post colonial 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.