Category Archives: Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture

Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture, Contemporary, Culture, Text and History

‘Who are the slaves now?’ Professor Paul Gilroy on Russell Brand’s Under the Skin

Paul Gilroy, Professor of American and English Literature, was the guest expert on the second episode of Russell Brand’s new series ‘Under the Skin’.

Professor Gilroy discusses the re-emergence of open racism within political rhetoric, the relationship between race and religion, and why we still divide humanity into different identity groups based on skin colour.

Listen on Art19.com.

Or watch on YouTube:

Blog posts on King’s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King’s College London.

20th - 21st Centuries, Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture, Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

From Broadcast to Podcast: Reflections on Radio, Resistance and Legacies of the BBC World Service

by Sejal Sutaria, Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow, English Department, King’s College London, and Pragya Dhital, PhD (2016), Religions and Philosophies Department, SOAS

My journey into radio research began when a series of happy accidents led me to discover the ‘British in India Oral Archive’ at the British Library, SOAS, and Imperial War Museums. The interviews here were conducted by history writer Charles Allen, best known for his books on Indian colonial history, Rudyard Kipling, and Tibet. As someone working on a project about how the global circulation of migrants, capital and ideas shaped Indian resistance to colonialism and fascism, my access to these first-hand accounts of life in India during the forties led me to link ideas of literary life-writing with oral history. When the World Service Project at King’s invited proposals from researchers working on radio, Elaine Morley and I decided to organise the ‘BBC and the World Service: Debts and Legacies’ conference.

Continue reading From Broadcast to Podcast: Reflections on Radio, Resistance and Legacies of the BBC World Service →

Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture, Gender and Sexuality

Loving, Living and Resisting: a Postcolonial Conversation

By Diya Gupta, PhD researcher, Department of English – find her here.

“Choti yeh hai teri saanp ki hi lehar Dogana

Khati hun tere vaste main zahar Dogana

(This plait of yours is the wave of a serpent, Dogana

I take poison because of you, Dogana)”

– Lines from nineteenth-century Urdu Rekhti poet Insha Allah Khan

 

What do we know about the representation of same-sex romantic and sexual relations in early nineteenth-century north India? And how does this relate to the transnational realm of early twentieth-century democratic thought? A postcolonial conversation on recent publications by two outstanding postcolonial scholars revealed how love and desire, revolutionary ethics and aesthetics, connect these two worlds in the final King’s in Conversation with series for 2015/16.

Continue reading Loving, Living and Resisting: a Postcolonial Conversation →

20th - 21st Centuries, Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture

South Asians and the First World War: Reflections

by Dr Natasha Awais-Dean, Project and Communications Manager  of ‘Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during the First World War’ (HERA)

Fig 13

 

Despite there being over 1 million South Asian soldiers fighting in the war alongside two million Africans as well as troops from New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, there has traditionally been a rather narrow and Anglo-centric view of how the history of the First World War has been communicated within Britain. Yet, the true story is far more complex and wide-ranging than this suggests.

Over the last two years, there has been greater visibility of the South Asian contribution to the First World War but we still have a long way to go. Now that we have reached the midpoint of the centennial commemoration, how do we keep up the momentum while at the same time find a way, as Dr Santanu Das notes, to go ‘beyond simple recovery and commemoration’ and address the complexity of the history? How do we find creative ways of engaging with the South Asian contribution to draw in fresh generations?

What seems to have been driving this greater visibility of the South Asian war story in Britain is its relation to a broader British Asian identity today – can the contribution of the South Asian soldiers, who served alongside English Tommies, be used to achieve greater racial harmony? Indeed, could this be the key to healing the current racial and ethnic divides in our society (something that we are perhaps feeling now more than ever), but without sanitising any of the horrors of the war or ignoring the racial hierarchies and inequalities that marked the colonial war experience? The need for authenticity is paramount, to maintain integrity in dealing with this often messy history in both an ethical and, crucially, productive manner. Continue reading South Asians and the First World War: Reflections →

19th Century, Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture

London is my East: A Reflection on Travel

By Dr Alvin Eng Hui Lim, department alumnus and postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore.

I’m on a British Airways flight from Changi airport, Singapore to Heathrow, London. The cabin crew, a mix of ethnicities, leaves me alone after the initial smiles and courtesies with the inflight entertainment, only punctuating my viewing experience a couple of times to serve me microwaved food – mostly chicken, or vaguely tasting like it.

I’m at Heathrow. A Chinese custom officer chides me in impeccable English for not completing the landing card before I join the queue. I do as told, and my voice struggles to complete a sentence when another custom officer addresses me and stamps my passport.

“What are you here for? What are you studying?”

“PhD. Theatre. At King’s College London.”

Maybe it is my face and how I sound. An inner joke seems to flash across his face as it changes. I am free to go.

Continue reading London is my East: A Reflection on Travel →