Scripting anxiety/scripting identity: Indian mutiny, history, and the colonial imaginary, 1857-1911

Scripting Anxiety/Scripting Identity examines the impact of the 1857 Indian Mutiny on British and Indian cultural consciousness and collective memory. I focus on anxious articulations about material objects, racial and sexual identities, and religion to argue these are symptomatic of a greater problem in mutiny narratives. Namely, the failure to situate the event, write or define it, in context of grand narratives. I show anxieties about objects, identities, and religion can be read from two corresponding directions. First, as discursively representing the dangers posed by the rebellion to political hegemony and established symbolic systems. And, second, as symptomatic of desires for reclaiming authority and re-constituting subjectivities. My task has been one of accentuating the tension between these two, suggesting their responsibility in the construction of the event’s affective dispensations in the Anglo-Indian mindscape, and finally, presenting a hypothetical theorization on the relationship between subaltern insurgency and colonialism. This dissertation is the centerpiece of an active research agenda that looks at, first, representations of the Mutiny in “postcolonial” British and Indian writings in comparison to colonial narratives; and, second, how anxiety-ridden articulations about the Mutiny map onto present-day transnational concerns over “homeland” insecurities as manifested in literature, film, and new media.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Comparative Literature

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2010

Author dc:creator

• Basu Thakur, Gautam

Contributors dc:contributor

• Blake, Nancy
• Goodlad, Lauren
• Hassan, Wail S.
• Basu, Anustup
• Pandharipande, Rajeshwari V.

• Psychoanalysis
• British and Indian Literature
• Subaltern Theory.
• Indian Mutiny
• Anxiety
• Postcolonial Studies

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2010 by Gautam Basu Thakur.

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/17038

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/17038