Colonial Voices

Beschreibung

Drawing on a vast array of textual sources, this analysis of the discourse of colonialism tracks the many narratives and narrative strategies of imperial domination. Focusing on British involvement in India, the material collated for this revealing study includes travelogues, administrative reports, memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, anthropological tracts, parliamentary debates, and instruction manuals. It shows how subtle changes of emphasis reflect evolving colonial attitudes toward conquered territories, shifting from flights of the imagination to factual inquiry, to a narrative of exoticism and heterogeneity that safely compartmentalized colonial "otherness" via natural history, ethnography, and cartographies of disease. The book adopts a thematic approach to elucidate the cultural myth-making at the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, focusing on law and order, landscape-planning, and domestication, and showing how dominance and political power were naturalized through awe-inspiring spectacles that humbled natives into obedience. This constructed colonial narrative helped legitimize imperial ambitions as charitable humanitarianism, rather than expose them as asset-stripping and economic manipulation. Finally, the narrative examines colonial aesthetics, arguing that disciplines like archaeology and art history situated Indian art and architecture within a colonial project of interpretation, ironically co-creating fresh notions of "Englishness" and English characters.
This accessible cultural history explores 400 years of British imperial adventure in India, developing a coherent narrative through a wide range of colonial documents, from exhibition catalogues to memoirs and travelogues. It shows how these texts helped legitimize the moral ambiguities of colonial rule even as they helped the English fashion themselves. * An engaging examination of European colonizers' representations of native populations * Analyzes colonial discourse through an impressive range of primary sources, including memoirs, letters, exhibition catalogues, administrative reports, and travelogues * Surveys 400 years of India's history, from the 16th century to the end of the British Empire * Demonstrates how colonial discourses naturalized the racial and cultural differences between the English and the Indians, and controlled anxieties over these differences

Autor*in

Pramod K. Nayar

Themen in »Colonial Voices«

Asian & Australasian History Geschichte Geschichte / Asien u. Australasien History Literatur Literature Literaturwissenschaft Postcolonial Theory Theorie der Postkolonialzeit

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