Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880–1930 (Race and Resistance Across Borders in the Long Twentieth Century)

Description

Between 1880 and 1930, the British Empire’s vast infrastructural developments facilitated the incorporation of large parts of the globe into not only its imperial rule, but also the capitalist world-system. Throughout this period, colonial literary fiction, in recording this vast expansion, repeatedly cited these imperial infrastructures to make sense of the various colonial landscapes in which they were set. Physical embodiments of empire proliferate in this writing. Railways and trains, telegraph wires and telegrams, roads and bridges, steamships and shipping lines, canals and other forms of irrigation, cantonments, the colonial bungalow, and other kinds of colonial urban infrastructure – all of these infrastructural lines broke up the landscape and gave shape to the literary depiction and production of colonial space. By developing a methodology called «infrastructural reading», the author shows how a focus on the infrastructural networks that circulate through colonial fiction are almost always related to some form of anti-imperial resistance that manifests spatially within their literary, narrative and formal elements. This subversive reading strategy – which is applied in turn to writers as varied as H. Rider Haggard, Olive Schreiner and John Buchan in South Africa, and Flora Annie Steel, E.M. Forster and Edward Thompson in India – demonstrates that these mostly pro-imperial writings can reveal an array of ideological anxieties, limitations and silences as well as more direct objections to and acts of violent defiance against imperial control and capitalist accumulation. Cover Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Infrastructure, Resistance, Literature Infrastructure and the Networked World-System ‘The Colonial Present’: Criticism as Resistance Infrastructural Reading: The Infrastructures in and of Colonial Literature Hobson, Luxemburg, Lenin: Why 1880 to 1930? Spatial ‘Resistance’: The Politics of a Term Colonial Literature: Why These Texts? Chapter 1: Mapping Humanitarianism: Flora Annie Steel and the Contradictions of Colonial Capitalism Introduction: From Contradiction to Resistance The ‘Gaps’ of Colonial Capitalism in On the Face of the Waters (1896) Consolidating Ideology: Flags, Telegraphs and Governmental Reports The Silences of Steel’s Short Fiction Perspectival Shifts: Resisting Infra-Structural Violence Chapter 2: Mapping Segregation: Literary Geographies of South Africa Introduction: Industrialisation, Urbanisation, Segregation The Infrastructure of the Imperial Romance: King Solomon’s Mines Racial Segregation and the Cape to Cairo Railway Grounding Meta-Narrative: Olive Schreiner’s Geographies of Resistance Rewriting the Imperial Romance: The Revolutionary Trajectories of ‘Ula Masondo’ (1927) Chapter 3: Mapping Frontiers: John Buchan and the Topographies of Imperial Ideology Introduction: Frontiers and Borderlands The Infrastructure of the Frontier The Symbolic Cartographies of Prester John Encoding Narrative: Landscape and Ideology in The Thirty-Nine Steps ‘Double Flight’: The Oscillations of the Frontier Chapter 4: Mapping Nationalism: Allegories of Uneven Development Introduction: Geographies of Division, Unity and Uneven Development From Forster to Candler and Thompson: Biographical Symmetries The Uneven Topographies of Nationalist Ideology Meteorological Metaphors and Violent Resistance ‘Palliative Imperialism’: Producing India’s Rural Space Resistance in the Imperial Capital: Producing Urban Space Conclusion: Towards an Infrastructural Reading of the Present Bibliography Primary Texts Secondary Texts Index