With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Empire: The 19th Century Global Novel in English.’ In Joel Evans ed., Globalisation and Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp.80-93.

This chapter addresses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization, for which empire was the constitutive ground. We will observe how the novel composed what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ that combined together human relationships and their wider contexts in communicable ways even when, as here, those contexts extended beyond the nation and took on global dimensions (Williams 1973: 158). Throughout, globalization will be taken as the incremental and unequal incorporation of non-capitalist regions of the world into the rising capitalist economies of Europe and then North America, a process accompanied by the uneven imposition of cultural, technological and infrastructural influence (Wallerstein 1996). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization through the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth unevenly and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. To capture two contrasting yet interestingly complementary views of this system, we therefore take our illustrative examples in this chapter from, on the one hand, Charles Dickens’s writing from the heart of empire in London, and, on the other, from the South African Olive Schreiner’s work set in – and mostly written from – zones of economic extraction. Read more.

‘Beyond Experience: The Rise of Anti-Racist Non-Fiction.’ In Emma Parker, Joshua Doble, & Liam Liburd eds., British Culture After Empire: The Contested History of Decolonisation, Migration, and Race in Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, pp.87-105.

In Britain, the ‘anti-racist non-fiction’ genre blends memoir with social and historical commentary to build similar connections between individual experiences and structural conditions, often (though not always) without conforming to the individualising inclinations of identity politics that are otherwise so pervasive in our neoliberal era. My aim in this chapter is to explore how this process works by focusing on two of the most rigorous and best-selling of Britain’s anti-racist non-fiction titles. I look first at Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017) and discuss its implications for anti-racist work. I then o!er a brief overview of a larger body of British anti-racist non-fiction, much of which is written under Eddo-Lodge’s influence, before turning to a concluding discussion of Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018). In brief moments throughout this discussion, I will link this to experiences of my own, as a postgraduate student and then academic who has worked in higher education for over a decade. My intention here is to reveal the importance of experience to analyses of institutional racism, and to undermine the rhetorical separation of ‘academic’ writing from individual biography.. Read more.

‘Rudyard Kipling and the Networks of Empire: Writing Imperial Infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous.’ In Promodini Varma & Anubhav Pradhan eds., Proximate Strangers: Kipling and Yeats at 150. London & New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.192-210.

In the decade preceding the publication of Kim (1901), the novel widely regarded as Kipling’s masterpiece, he wrote two other novels: The Light that Failed (1891) and Captains Courageous (1896). Kipling’s first attempts at novel writing, unlike the short stories and poems he had already published to critical acclaim, have widely been regarded by literary critics as failures, and their publication and sales history suggests as much. I argue that Kipling, at a historical moment in which communication and transport networks were drastically expanding across the face of the globe, was struggling to write a novel that represented these imperial infrastructures and global networks in the worldly reach they were beginning to attain. In so doing, Kipling was trying to write a new kind of networked literature, one both formally and geographically expansive in scope, often with an eye on the U.S., but always with an eye on the world. The fact that these efforts failed in this regard is revealing – by counter-intuitively looking at the moments when his novels fail, this chapter asks what they might be able to tell us about imperial identity, global consciousness, and the rise of an imperial network of physical infrastructures and highways of communication and exchange that still, at least in some part, shape the world in the twenty-first century. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Postcolonialism and South-South Relations.’ In Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh ed., The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations. London & New York: Routledge, 2018, pp.48-58.

Postcolonial studies or postcolonialism is a critical theoretical approach that emerged in the Anglo-American academy in the 1980s, and has tended to base itself at once conceptually and politically on a division of the world into ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, even as it then sets out to challenge such distinctions. This rest was first understood to be the non-aligned ‘Third World’ or developing world, but has more recently come to be referred to as the global South. With the rise of the neoliberal order since the 1980s and subsequent increased and intensified global inequalities, there was a perceived need in the South to address such developments and foster greater cooperation and unity, and postcolonial studies was one such response. From the outset, however, this simplistic, binary geographical split was a contradictory position for the field to inhabit. The subject of its critique was precisely the formal dissolution of the imperial world from the 1940s to the 1960s, hence postcolonialism. Meanwhile, its methodology was cross-disciplinary, a mode of analysis applied to various subjects, from the literary and cultural to the anthropological and economic. Of course, there were other colonial-era disciplines that, though developed in the Western academy, referenced ‘othered’ subjects and other parts of the world, but they mostly attempted to conceal these contradictions. By contrast, postcolonial criticism was specifically concerned to question, deconstruct and undermine binary divisions of colonial self and colonised other, and to nuance, complicate and interrogate paradigms of West and rest, us and them. Read more.

With Erica Lombard & Benjamin Mountford. ‘Introduction. Fighting Words: Books and the Making of the Postcolonial World.’ In Davies, Lombard & Mountford eds., Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp.1-26.

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent can anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance movements across the planet be traced back to, or be found to have their ideas rooted in, materially circulating texts? These questions undergird the fifteen chapters of which this collection is comprised, which together examine how the book as both a cultural form and material object has fuelled resistance to empire and shaped the contours of the postcolonial world in the long twentieth century. Read more.

‘From Communism to Postcapitalism: Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto.’ In Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard & Benjamin Mountford eds., Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp.27-42.

History bears testament to the Manifesto’s planetary circulation, global readership and material impact. Interpretations of this short document have affected the lives of millions globally, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The text is somehow able to outline the complex theoretical foundations for the world’s most enduring critique of capitalism in a comprehensible and persuasive language, and as such, readers of all classes, professions, nations and ethniities have drawn on – and in many cases warped and manipulated – its valuable insights. Whilst arguing for the importance of the Manifesto as an anti-imperial book and exploring the reasons for its viral circulation, this chapter will also show that it is a self-reflexive text that predicts its own historic impact. It is the formal and generic – or, in fact, ‘literary’ – qualities of this astonishing document that have given it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist writing. Read more.

‘Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity, and the Politics of Socioeconomic Critique.’ In Alex Tickell ed., South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.119-138.

This chapter argues that Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower moves beyond idiosyncratic concerns around issues of authenticity to produce a discursive space of dissent in opposition to the economic inequalities and pervasive corruption of the socio-political context in which it is set. The narrative throws the wider political and socio-economic effects of neoliberalism into relief as they manifest primarily in the policies of urban land redevelopment that are symptomatic of Mumbai’s contentious history around property and land rights. The novel also uses the Bombay Rent Act of 1979 as a lens with which to shed light on the corruption and profit-oriented complicity of various national and state institutions that have, in twenty-fi rst-century Mumbai, become the servants of capital. Read more.