Scripting Anxiety/scripting Identity: Indian Mutiny, History, and the Colonial Imaginary, 1857--1911
Basu Thakur, Gautam
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/87302
Description
Title
Scripting Anxiety/scripting Identity: Indian Mutiny, History, and the Colonial Imaginary, 1857--1911
Author(s)
Basu Thakur, Gautam
Issue Date
2010
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Blake, Nancy
Lauren M.E.Goodlad
Department of Study
Comparative Literature
Discipline
Comparative Literature
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Asian
Language
eng
Abstract
"Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity examines the impact of the 1857 Indian Mutiny on British and Indian cultural consciousness and collective memory. I focus on anxious articulations about material objects, racial and sexual identities, and religion to argue these are symptomatic of a greater problem in mutiny narratives. Namely, the failure to situate the event, write or define it, in context of grand narratives. I show anxieties about objects, identities, and religion can be read from two corresponding directions. First, as discursively representing the dangers posed by the rebellion to political hegemony and established symbolic systems. And, second, as symptomatic of desires for reclaiming authority and re-constituting subjectivities. My task has been one of accentuating the tension between these two, suggesting their responsibility in the construction of the event's affective dispensations in the Anglo-Indian mindscape, and finally, presenting a hypothetical theorization on the relationship between subaltern insurgency and colonialism. This dissertation is the centerpiece of an active research agenda that looks at, first, representations of the Mutiny in ""postcolonial"" British and Indian writings in comparison to colonial narratives; and, second, how anxiety-ridden articulations about the Mutiny map onto present-day transnational concerns over ""homeland"" insecurities as manifested in literature, film, and new media."
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