Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire

Pramod K. Nayar is a member of the English Faculty at the University of Hyderabad, India. He has been Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Charles Wallace India Trust--British Council Fellow at the University of Kent at Canterbury and Fulbright Senior Fellow at Cornell University. His many publications include States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotion (2011), An Introduction to New Media and Cybercultures (2010), Postcolonialism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2010), English Writing and India, 1600--1920: Colonizing Aesthetics (2008), and Writing Wrongs: The Cultural Construction of Human Rights in India (2012). Forthcoming is a book on new media.

Acknowledgments vii 1 Introducing Colonial Discourse 1 2 Travel, Exploration, and "Discovery": From Imagination to Inquiry 12 Imagining Multiple Worlds: The Fantasy of "Discovery" 18 The Narrative Organization of Discovery 29 "Inquiry" and the Documentation of the Others 41 Conclusion: "Discovery" and Wonder, "Contracted and Epitomized" 49 3 The Discourse of Difference: Constructing the Colonial Exotic 55 The Colony and Imperial Wealth 57 The Exotic in English Culture 59 The Colonial Exotic: Aesthetics, Science, and Difference 60 The Sentimental Exotic 62 The Scientific Exotic 79 Conclusion: From the Indian to the Colonial Exotic 95 4 Empire Management: From Domestication to Spectacle 104 The Domestication of Colonial Spaces 106 Administering Colonial Spaces 121 "Raising the General Credit of the Empire": The Spectacle of Empire 140 Conclusion: Imperial Improvisation and the Spectacle 145 5 Civilizing the Empire: The Ideology of Moral and Material Progress 161 England's Age of Improvement 164 Discipline and Improve 170 Imperial Lessons 174 The Salvific Colonial 178 Rescue, Reform, and Race 183 Conclusion: From Improvement to Self-Legitimization 194 6 Aesthetic Understanding: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitans 201 The Self-Fashioning of the Scholar-Colonial 204 Antiquarian Aesthetics and Colonial Authority 213 "Consumption, Ingestion, and Decoration": Colonial Commodities 219 The "Empire City": Pageantry and Empire 226 Conclusion: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitan 229 References 235 Index 260