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Author: Kate Marsh
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-06
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1317313836
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Examines metropolitan French-language representations of India from the period between the recall of Dupleix to France to the Second Treaty of Paris. This book explores what a European power, territorially peripheral in India, thought of both India and the administrative rule there of its rival, Britain.
Author: Nicola Frith
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2014-04-24
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 0739180010
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Indian uprisings (1857–58) against British rule in India represent an iconic period within the history of anti-colonial resistance. Numerous works have considered these historical events from British and Indian perspectives, but none have yet questioned how they were viewed by Britain’s foremost colonial rival in India, the French. The French Colonial Imagination examines how the potential for Britain to lose its most lucrative colony at the hands its own colonial “subjects” allowed French writers to envisage a world freed from British dominance. The uprisings offered the attractive possibility that France could undergo a colonial revival in the wake of British defeat, thereby reversing the devastating losses inflicted upon France’s former empire at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Notable among these losses was Britain’s decision (in the Treaty of 1814) to permanently reduce France’s presence in India to five small trading posts scattered around the periphery of British territory. The extent to which to the French colonial imagination of the nineteenth century was shaped by the memories of such defeats forms a primary concern of this monograph. This investigation into French responses to the Indian uprisings reveals that French colonial discourse was determined as much by its visions of the colonized “other,” as by the dominance of their British rivals. Drawing from journalistic, historical, political, and fictional texts written during Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852–70) and in the early years of the Third Republic (1870–1944), The French Colonial Imagination shows how the uprisings gave French writers the opportunity to speak out against the rapacity of British colonialism and its treatment of colonized Indians, while simultaneously constructing a competing colonial discourse that would justify further expansion in North Africa and South East Asia. Standing at a crossroads between the “loss” of Ancien Régime’s empireand the Third Republic’s ideological investment in overseas expansion, this understudied period of colonial history reveals the centrality of loss, fracture, and political emasculation as core preoccupations haunting the French colonial discourse in its quest to regain cultural and ideological ascendancy over its greatest political enemy.
Author: Benita Parry
Publisher: Verso
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 294
ISBN-13: 9781859841280
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →No cultural phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s in Britain was more curious than the Raj revival, with its slew of films and fictions, its rage for memorabilia of imperial rule in India, and its strange nostalgia for a time and a world long since past. Today, with the arrival of so-called postcolonial studies, that revival lives on in a strange afterlife of critical study. Writing some years before Raj nostalgia became all the rage, and out of the rather different political and intellectual climate of 1960s national liberation struggles, Benita Parry produced what remains one of the landmark studies of British attitudes towards India. Available for the first time in Paper, Delusions and Discoveries authoritatively surveys the mix of racist and jingoistic prejudices that dominated the writings of Anglo-Indians from Flora Annie Steele and Maud Diver to Kipling and beyond. The book also includes treatments of more liberal thinkers like Edmund Candler, Edward James Thompson and E. M. Forster, as well as a new preface by the author situating her work in relation to recent studies of the culture of colony and empire.
Author: Leila Neti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-04-22
Total Pages: 315
ISBN-13: 1108950744
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Situated at the intersection of law and literature, nineteenth-century studies and post-colonialism, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination draws on original archival research to shed new light on Victorian literature. Each chapter explores the relationship between the shared cultural logic of law and literature, and considers how this inflected colonial sociality. Leila Neti approaches the legal archive in a distinctly literary fashion, attending to nuances of voice, character, diction and narrative, while also tracing elements of fact and procedure, reading the case summaries as literary texts to reveal the common turns of imagination that motivated both fictional and legal narratives. What emerges is an innovative political analytic for understanding the entanglements between judicial and cultural norms in Britain and the colony, bridging the critical gap in how law and literature interact within the colonial arena.
Author: Raphaël Malangin
Publisher: Roli Books
Published: 2015
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9788174369864
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →At the pinnacle of French power in India, Pondicherry sparked the imagination of those back home. Pondicherry was the French window on Indian culture, proudly seen as the Gallic Gateway of India. For over three centuries this gateway witnessed the busy trade of spices, beautiful textiles, woven cloth and later peanuts in return for a steady flow of gold, silver, weapons, merchants, priests, soldiers and adventurers. Later, as the English tightened their noose around Pondicherry, the beleaguered French were caught up in their own fateful and impossible attempt to combine colonial and republican principles. History was played out street by street in old Pondicherry and the wealth of these experiences have left an indelible mark on the unique cosmopolitan city that is Pondicherry today. The purpose of this book is to present a brief, illustrated history of these places that once were French.
Author: Pratima Prasad
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-05-07
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 1135846529
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book investigates how French Romanticism was shaped by and contributed to colonial discourses of race. It studies the ways in which metropolitan Romantic novels—that is, novels by French authors such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, François René de Chateaubriand, Claire de Duras, and Prosper Mérimée—comprehend and construct colonized peoples, fashion French identity in the context of colonialism, and record the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans. While the primary texts that come under investigation in the book are novels, close attention is paid to Romantic fiction’s interdependence with naturalist treatises, travel writing, abolitionist texts, and ethnographies. Colonialism, Race, and the French Romantic Imagination is one of the first books to carry out a sustained and comprehensive analysis of the French Romantic novel’s racial imagination that encompasses several sites of colonial contact: the Indian Ocean, North America, the Caribbean, West Africa, and France. Its archival research and interdisciplinary approach shed new light on canonical texts and expose the reader to non-canonical ones. The book will be useful to students and academics involved with Romanticism, colonial historians, students and scholars of transatlantic studies and postcolonial studies, as well as those interested in questions of race and colonialism.
Author: David Hammerbeck
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-11-30
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 1000468747
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book examines the French theatricalization of India from 1770 to 1865 and how a range of plays not only represented India to the French viewing public but also staged issues within French culture including colonialism, imperialism, race, gender, and national politics. Through examining these texts and available performance history, and incorporating historical texts and cultural theory, David Hammerback analyses these works to illustrate a complex of cultural representations: some contested Orientalism, some participated in Western colonialist discourses, while some can be placed somewhere between these two markers of ideology in Western culture and the arts. He also assesses the works which participated in shaping the theatrical face of Western hegemony, ones directly participating in Orientalism as delineated by Edward Said and others. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, French literature, history and cultural studies.
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-06-16
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 0691214212
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation. Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination. But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous. Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.
Author: Robert Ivermee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-12-15
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 1787385167
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges flowing south to the Bay of Bengal, is now little known outside of India. Yet for centuries it was a river of truly global significance, attracting merchants, missionaries, mercenaries, statesmen, laborers and others from Europe, Asia and beyond. Hooghly seeks to restore the waterway to the heart of global history. Focusing in turn on the role of and competition between those who struggled to control the river--the Portuguese, the Mughals, the Dutch, the French and finally the British, who built their imperial capital, Calcutta, on its banks--the author considers how the Hooghly was integrated into global networks of encounter and exchange, and the dramatic consequences that ensued. Traveling up and down the river, Robert Ivermee explores themes of enduring concern, among them the dynamics of modern capitalism and the power of large corporations; migration and human trafficking; the role of new technologies in revolutionizing social relations; and the human impact on the natural world. The Hooghly's global history, he concludes, may offer lessons for India as it emerges as a world superpower.
Author: Kate Marsh
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2013-08-28
Total Pages: 151
ISBN-13: 0739176579
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This study interrogates how the French empire was imagined in three literary representations of French colonialism: the conquest of Tahiti, and the established colonial systems in Martinique and in India. The study is the first in either English or French to demonstrate that representations of power relations, as well as the broader discourses with which they were linked, were as closely concerned with probing the similarities and differences of rival European colonial systems as they were with reinforcing their imagined superiority over the colonized, and that such power relations should not be conceptualized as a dualistic categorization of ‘colonizer’ versus ‘colonized’. In doing so, it aims to go beyond examining the interaction between colonized and colonizer, or between colonial centre and periphery, and to interrogate instead the circulation of ideas and practices across different sites of European colonialism, drawing attention to a historical complexity which has been neglected in the necessary race to recover voices previously occluded from academic analysis. In exploring how the notion of the French empire overseas was construed and how it was infused with meaning at three different historical moments, 1784, 1835 and 1938, it demonstrates how precarious the French empire was perceived to be, in terms of both European rivalry and resistance from the colonized, and how the rhetoric of a French colonisation douce was pitted against the inscribed excesses of the more powerful British empire. Rather than employing the sorts of recuperative agenda which focus on how the colonized were elided (viz., Subaltern Studies) or on the writings of the formerly colonized (viz., Francophone Studies), the study concerns itself specifically with how French colonialism and imperialism were perceived, and thus offers a further corrective to any generalizations about European colonialism and imperialism. More particularly, by examining how the representational strategy of nostalgia is used in these texts, the study demonstrates how perceived loss, and nostalgia for an imperial past, played a role in dynamically shaping the French colonial enterprise across its various manifestations.
