Already, in terms of the official word, you were not supposed to believe them they were all lies. “It wasn’t as if these stories were believed to be true, and then five years later someone comes around and debunks them. “What interested me about the Mutiny is that there was such an enormous narrative energy to these stories, and yet the stories were almost immediately dismissed as fiction,” Ms. The result is another critical work in the burgeoning area of “colonial discourse” analysis. Forster’s A Passage to India and “genre” fiction of the 19th century, showing that the stories of Mutiny atrocities formed a “racial memory” that has been kept alive in various fictional treatments.Īllegories of Empire blends a study of how race is depicted under colonialism with feminist theories about gender roles and sexual difference. The book, published this month by the University of Minnesota Press, takes as its focus canonical literature such as E.M. How the theme of rape has circulated through the colonial imagination is the subject of Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text, by Jenny Sharpe, an assistant professor of English at Boston College. But the rumors had already done their work. Magistrates called in to investigate “eyewitness” accounts could find no evidence of systematic rape and mutilation. Yet just as quickly as they cropped up, the rumors proved to be false. As rebellions swept across northern India, the end of British colonial rule seemed at hand.ĭuring the early days of the Indian Mutiny, a strange and terrifying rumor took hold among the colonialists, spreading all the way back to England: “Savage” natives were systematically raping and dismembering English women. Thousands of Indian troops in the Bengal army in Meerut mutinied, setting fire to homes and killing British officers and their families. For the British in India, May 10, 1857, was a day of infamy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |