Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue

Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-231-13808-6
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 553 g

Focusing on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories of detection, policing, and espionage by British and South Asian writers, Yumna Siddiqi presents an original and compelling exploration of the cultural anxieties created by imperialism. She suggests that while colonial writers use narratives of intrigue to endorse imperial rule, postcolonial writers turn the generic conventions and topography of the fiction of intrigue on its head, launching a critique of imperial power that makes the repressive and emancipatory impulses of postcolonial modernity visible.

Siddiqi devotes the first part of her book to the colonial fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, in which the British regime's preoccupation with maintaining power found its voice. The rationalization of difference, pronouncedly expressed through the genre's strategies of representation and narrative resolution, helped to reinforce domination and, in some cases, allay fears concerning the loss of colonial power.

In the second part, Siddiqi argues that late twentieth-century South Asian writers also underscore the state's insecurities, but unlike British imperial writers, they take a critical view of the state's authoritarian tendencies. Such writers as Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie use the conventions of detective and spy fiction in creative ways to explore the coercive actions of the postcolonial state and the power dynamics of a postcolonial New Empire.

Drawing on the work of leading theorists of imperialism such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and the Subaltern Studies historians, Siddiqi reveals how British writers express the anxious workings of a will to maintain imperial power in their writing. She also illuminates the ways South Asian writers portray the paradoxes of postcolonial modernity and trace the ruses and uses of reason in a world where the modern marks a horizon not only of hope but also of economic, military, and ecological disaster.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Siddiqi, Yumna

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Indische & Dravidische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Colonial Anxieties and the Fiction of Intrigue2. Imperial Intrigue in an English Country House3. Sherlock Holmes and "the Cesspool of Empire": The Return of the Repressed4. The Fiction of Counterinsurgency5. Intermezzo: Postcolonial Modernity and the Fiction of Intrigue6. Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh's The Circle of Reason7. "Deep in Blood": Roy, Rushdie, and the Representation of State Violence in India8. "The Unhistorical Dead": Violence, History, and Narrative in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's GhostConclusion: "Power Smashes Into Private Lives": Cultural Politics in the New EmpireNotesIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Yumna Siddiqi grew up in Bombay, where she lived by the sea. She went to college at Brandeis University outside Boston and earned a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City. She is now associate professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont.