Racializing white residues: seditious Anglo-Indians and others

Chanda, Debojoy

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/101673 Copy

Description

Title

Racializing white residues: seditious Anglo-Indians and others

Author(s)

Chanda, Debojoy

Issue Date

2018-07-06

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Basu, Anustup

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Basu, Anustup

Committee Member(s)

• Koshy, Susan
• Basu, Manisha
• Hansen, James

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Post-colonial studies
• Anglo-Indians
• sexual sedition
• the Anglo-Indian question
• mongrel bodies.

Abstract

My dissertation interrogates the discursive residues of the Anglo-Indian question in decolonized India. To problematize these residues, I structure my dissertation as a fragmented genealogy of colonial and post-colonial perceptions of Anglo-Indians. I open my dissertation by showing how, since the late-nineteenth century, Anglo-Indians were claimed to be only of part-European racial provenance, and tautologically had their bodies deemed sexually deviant. Their bodies being, like those of their non-Anglo-Indian counterparts, in fact of uncertain racial intermixture, I argue that Anglo-Indians inhabit mongrel bodies—bodies in a state of continual flux of class and race, inhabiting a multiplicity of pluralized communities. The ethical end of the decolonized Indian nation-state, I accordingly suggest, is to facilitate the recognition of mongrelism as an inevitable phenomenon across groups—one that fractures monolithic conceptions of race and community. To flesh out this argument, I conduct readings from an archive of novels, historiographic treatises, short stories, memoirs, films, and cartoons. The figures whose texts I examine include, among others, colonial Anglo-Indian ‘prostitute’ Amelia Horne, Anglo-Indian anti-racism activist Cedric Dover, Bengali novelist Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, diasporic English writer Aubrey Menen, Indian cartoonist Mario Miranda, Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, Anglo-Indian politician and historiographer Frank Anthony, and British-Indian writer Ruskin Bond.

Graduation Semester

2018-08

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101673

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2018 Debojoy Chanda

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