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"British India Fiction."
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Portable property
What fueled the Victorian passion for hair-jewelry and memorial rings? When would an everyday object metamorphose from commodity to precious relic? InPortable Property, John Plotz examines the new role played by portable objects in persuading Victorian Britons that they could travel abroad with religious sentiments, family ties, and national identity intact. In an empire defined as much by the circulation of capital as by force of arms, the challenge of preserving Englishness while living overseas became a central Victorian preoccupation, creating a pressing need for objects that could readily travel abroad as personifications of Britishness. At the same time a radically new relationship between cash value and sentimental associations arose in certain resonant mementoes--in teacups, rings, sprigs of heather, and handkerchiefs, but most of all in books.
Portable Propertyexamines how culture-bearing objects came to stand for distant people and places, creating or preserving a sense of self and community despite geographic dislocation. Victorian novels--because they themselves came to be understood as the quintessential portable property--tell the story of this change most clearly. Plotz analyzes a wide range of works, paying particular attention to George Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, Anthony Trollope'sEustace Diamonds, and R. D. Blackmore'sLorna Doone. He also discusses Thomas Hardy and William Morris's vehement attack on the very notion of cultural portability. The result is a richer understanding of the role of objects in British culture at home and abroad during the Age of Empire.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
eBook
Brown Romantics
Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century proceeds from the conviction that it is high time for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry.
eBook
Colonial Subjectivities and Shifting Legalities in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
The objective of this paper is to examine the representation of shifting legalities in Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies within the context of emerging legal regimes in early nineteenth-century British India. I argue that the novel makes two important interventions in the corpus of research interested in intersections of colonial histories and the development of socio-legal institutions. First, through overlapping stories of numerous characters who are differentiated by multiple levels of subalternity in terms of race, class, and gender as they navigate the colonial and customary legal regimes, the novel foregrounds the interconnections between law and the colonial enterprise and moves beyond the binary categories of legal subjects under colonial rule. Second, by showing the possibility of collective agency in the liminal space of the ship, the novel contributes to the growing attentiveness of scholars to the potential for legal subjects to individually or communally intervene in the formation of alternative and less-coercive legal regimes.
Journal Article
A passage to India
In this hard-hitting novel, first published in 1924, the murky personal relationship between an Englishwoman and an Indian doctor mirrors the troubled politics of colonialism. Adela Quested and her fellow British travelers, eager to experience the \"real\" India, develop a friendship with the urbane Dr. Aziz. While on a group outing, Adela and Dr. Aziz visit the Marabar caves together. As they emerge, Adela accuses the doctor of assaulting her. While Adela never actually claims she was raped, the decisions she makes ostracize her from both her countrymen and the natives, setting off a complex chain of events that forever changes the lives of all involved. This intense and moving story asks the listener serious questions about preconceptions regarding race, sex, religion, and truth. A political and philosophical masterpiece.
Book
From Small Things to Big Symbols. Transgressability of Borders in Arundhati Roy’s Works
While Arundhati Roy’s first novel, The God of Small Things (1997) mostly focused on the tragic outcomes of the rigid Indian caste system and found its place in the tradition of Marquezian magic realism and Salman Rushdie’s mythical and exotic portrayal of India, her second novel offers a complex description of a divided society. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) bears the mark of Roy’s vast experience in the field of political and environmental activism, her militant approach towards social injustice. The new novel is a patchwork of narratives focused around two main characters, the transsexual Anjum and Tilo, the ever revolting architect involved in the civil war in Kashmir. In the description of both hallucinatory violence and small, gentle moments of harmony and cooperation, Roy portrays the divided, postcolonial/neocolonial India where conflicts are constantly emerging on religious, political, social and sexual levels. Borders seem impossible to cross when the conflict is thoroughly interiorised like in the case of the Delhi hijras, or has grown uncontrollable like in the civil war for Kashmir’s independence, yet they prove transgressable in the characters’ everyday practice.
Journal Article
A rising man
In the days of the British Raj in 1919, Captain Sam Wyndham, a former Scotland Yard detective newly arrived in Calcutta, is confronted with the murder of a British official who was found with a note in his mouth warning the British to leave India.
BOOK
\No Body to be Kicked?\ Monopoly, Financial Crisis, and Popular Revolt in 18th-Century Haiti and America
Contemporary law and legal theory are resigned to the view that the corporation is a mere nexus of contracts, a legal person lacking both body and soul. This essay explores that commitment to the immateriality of the corporation through a discussion of the 18th-century revolt against the Indies Company in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and British North America. Opponents of the joint-stock monopoly in these Atlantic settings believed, like critics of transnational corporate power today, that the company form represented a merger of wealth and power operating to subvert the liberties of disenfranchised outsiders. Financial crisis served to destabilize the fiscal and political environment that insulated the Indies Company from its critics, who took advantage of these openings by attacking the material embodiments of the corporation in the name of \"free trade.\" The 18th-century opposition to monopoly privilege suggests that corporate personality was neither dismissed as fiction nor accepted as reality, and that in some circumstances, at least, the corporate body could indeed be held to account for the sins of a person without conscience.
Journal Article