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My Research
My areas of research include Indian literature in English, British literature about India, modern Indian history, the history of the Europeans in India, and feminist as well as other forms of theory. Having spent 8 years studying Bharatanatyam, a classical dance of South India, I’m also interested in the devadasis or temple dancers, who created Bharatanatyam and whose history stands in significant contrast to better known nationalist and imperialist historical narratives about India. The theoretical grounding for my writing is generally political, so, not surprisingly, my work pays particular attention to questions regarding representations of gender, class, and race. And I suppose, because of its grounding in such lived (though always textually and ideologically negotiated) realities, my approach can also be thought of as a materialist one. Current ResearchMy new research involves theorizing and historicizing class in a number of different texts produced during the two centuries or so of British imperialism in India. The "poor whites," about whom Kipling had much to say, have been neglected in recent recoveries of modern British and Indian history and entirely ignored in literary scholarship. The recorded impressions of these people (their diaries, letters, works of fiction, memoirs, and so on) can add new ideas to our ever-expanding image of the British Raj and also help us to understand the workings of class in a highly-stratified colonial culture. I’m hoping that this research will eventually turn itself into a book-length study on class conflict in the British Raj. As it stands now, I’m in the process of writing a chapter that explores the depiction of soldiers and other working-class white men in the prose and poetry of such middle-class authors as Kipling and Sara Jeannette Duncan, especially how those depictions can be made to interact with the self-representations of these men, who wrote, among other things, memoirs (published and unpublished), journals, letters, and diaries. The writings and other historical traces of the women and girls from this imperial class of poor whites are much more difficult to access than even those of the men, but their presence in India during the British empire calls into question conventional assumptions about whiteness and femininity. I’m presently planning a chapter that focuses on these white female figures in colonial India in addition to another chapter specifically on Anna Leonowens (reconstructed for various historical purposes in the Hollywood films The King and I and Anna and the King), one of the only women from this group who was a published writer. |