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Fringes ofEmpireis a valuable collection that offers a new perspective from which
to view empire. The case studies contain much useful material that will be of interest to
scholars of Victorian studies. The focus on the margins convincingly shows that understanding these sites, locations, individuals, and populations, and expanding our theoretical exploration of the fringe and margin, is central to our understanding of the workings
of empire and will help to upend our preconceived certainties of center and periphery.
PREETI CHOPRA
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism, edited by Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai; pp. ix + 214. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010, £52.50, $84.00.
This timely and excellent collection of critical essays is a corrective to any supposition
that Rudyard Kipling's writings are now a thing of the past or an over-tilled ground for
scholarly investigation. Even to those familiar with recent developments in Kipling
studies—especially postcolonial methodologies that have complicated our understanding of the cultural hybridity, imperialism, ideological ambivalences, and artistic
techniques that animate Kipling's fiction and verse—Kipling and Beyond offers fresh
perspectives on well-known and lesser known writings, inviting reflection on contemporary critical practices and potential pitfalls in our approaches to Kipling as well as
more broadly to Victorian and imperialist literature. Revolving around the question
"why it is that Kipling continues to be a significant literary and cultural icon together
with the question of what the maintenance of this legacy variously means in [contemporary] counter-currents of postcolonialism and Anglo-American globalisation" (14), the
essays in this collection, while offering a heterogeneity of voices, approaches, and arguments, are unified in illuminating the relevance of (re)reading Kipling at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many of them also explore the bizarre recrudescence
of his work in post-9/11 discourses on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, imperial melancholia, and American imperialism, as well as unexpected links between his work and
that of postcolonial writers as diverse as C. L. R.James and Michael Ondaatje.
In a powerful lead essay, Benita Parry accumulates astonishing evidence of
Kipling's "Jjdaeophobia" to argue that the anti-Semitism permeating especially his later
writings bespeaks a fear not of "something or someone disquieting through otherness
and unfamiliarity" (22, 23), but of that which does not fit "established categories" and
hence troubles all categories (23), a fear of the cosmopolitan that she links to Kipling's
"flight from modernity" and its complications and his consequent nostalgic evocation of a
putative uncomplicated "Englishness rooted in a pastoral past" (25, 13). Arguing forcefully against recent critical efforts that read Kipling's work "proleptically as anticipating
contemporary social and cultural preoccupations" and glide over its more egregious ideological implications. Parry provides a salutary reminder of the stakes of such recuperation
(25). In an admirable essay that similarly takes a renewed stand against the negative
consequences of forgetting the darker sides of Kipling,Judith Plotz returns to "The White
Man's Burden" (1899) as a poem "again contending to become the new 'national anthem'
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for a triumphalist American Empire" (54), "seriously, respectfully" quoted by neoconservatives and liberals alike in a remarkable "transvaluation of empire/imperialism"
serving to "stoke American exceptionalism" (40,40,43). But, like postcolonial critics such
as Sara Suleri, Zohreh Sullivan, and myself, Plotz also points out the ways that Kipling can
and must equally be read as sounding a crucial warning of the costs and self-contradictions
of empire, such as the necessary abrogation of democracy under empire, or the "cultural
schizophrenia" and "constant terror of the unnameable at the very borders of control"
that hatmt Kipling's writings (53).
A number of essays in this collection reveal that "while there is a sense in which
an imperially chauvinistic Kipling may always be guilty as charged, his writing does not
foreclose a sense that, with a twist of the kaleidoscope, with another throw of the dice,
other constellations still remain and ought to remain possible" (11). Thus in intricate and
sophisticated readings. Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney explore the modes of friendship and youthful masculinity operative in Kipling's imperial narratives, while Jo Collins
links the well-known articulations of terror and the uncanny in Kipling's writings to the
resurgence of his work in writings emergent from the so-called War on Terror, examining
resonances between the psychically and culturally structured forms of terror and violence
in both, and showing how "terror is played out in dislocated ways, which function as
disavowalsofalteritywhilstappearing to confront what is terrifying" (86). While perhaps
a distinction between terror (fear) and terrorism (production of fear) might be heuristically useful for her more general arguments, CoUins's concrete readings are intensely
revealing, as for example her juxtaposition of Kipling's "The Mark of the Beast" (1890)
and a now iconic image of torture at Abu Ghraib to show how in both staged representations the "pain, voice and torture by a Western force are bracketed off" (92).
Perhaps the most unusual and startling essay of the collection is Harish Trivedi's staging of a "grand encounter" between Kipling and Edward Said, /A« "foundational
figure of postcolonial critical discourse" (120). Comparing two extant versions of Said's
discussion of Kipling's masterpiece Kim (1901) (Said's 1987 introduction and notes to the
Penguin edition, and his meticulously revised chapter "The Pleasures of Kim" in Culture
and Imperialism [1993]), and subjecting them to a rare scrutiny, Trivedi shows how Said,
"the great scourge of nineteenth-century Orientalism and the most politically radical of
postcolonial critics" (128), becomes "almost an apologist" for Kipling's Orientalist
aesthetics and politics (142). How to explain this anomaly where the very critic who taught
us to read contrapuntally, to connect Mcmsfleld Park (1814) to Antiguan slavery, deploys
"the highest mountains in the world to provide an apolitical and artistic shield for the
most famously imperialist of all British novelists" (141)? Said has become an easy target
for potshots against postcolonial discourse from both the left and right, but even his most
ardent supporters would find it hard to gainsay the cogency of Trivedi's points (despite
Trivedi's occasional snide tone), stich as Said's bizarre reliance on outdated and erroneous Orientalist sources for his editorial notes or on Etiropean canonical frames of
reference to the lamentable exclusion of more appropriate and illtiminating Indian ones.
If this was Said's Satanic verses moment, the inexplicable lapse that flies in the face of the
rest of his work, it is equally astonishing that it has gone unnoticed by other scholars.
Trivedi's tiltimate point though is not to lambast Said but to expose the effect of Kipling
as "symptomatic" in contemporary postcolonial scholarship, where Anglo-American
academic institutional pressures push scholars to claim expertise across continents and to
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homogenize vast historical and geographical differences, leading to a failure to pay attention to the specific contexts of each (post)colony (142).
The "beyond" of the volume's title thus refers not only to the temporal but
also to the textual, as its final essays shift to exploring unexpected links between
Kipling and various postcolonial intertexts. Shirley Chew offers a haunting meditation
on artistry, blindness, death, and loss in Kipling's stories and Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost
(2009), while Claire Westall explores C. L. R. James's adaptation of Kipling's lines
"what should they know of England who only England know" to "What do they know of
cricket who only cricket know" as a shift from the imperial imperative (England should
know about its empire) to a postcolonial understanding, via cricket (what they do know),
of the interwovenness of Englishness and Caribbeanness, and an exposé of imperial
hypocrisy (the English refusal to play by their own touted values of fair play) (165).
On the whole, this collection is an important addition to Kipling scholarship
and Victorian studies, establishing the continuing relevance and legacies of the Victorian
era in the present and the necessity of careful, historically attuned reading. The essays are
polished, intellectually deft, and economic yet packed, containing surprises even for the
experienced Kipling scholar. One drawback may be the lack of institutional and
geographical diversity among the contributors—of the eleven, eight are from the United
Kingdom, including five from the University of Kent, and two are from the United
States—possibly because many of the essays are drawn from papers presented at a Kipling
conference at Kent in 2007. They are, however, diverse and stimulating in suggesting ways
to read Kipling with requisite wariness and care, especially after 9/11.
AMBREEN H A I
Smith College
Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism, by Christopher M.
Keirstead; pp. xii + 276. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2011, $52.95.
The scholarly focus on the formation of nation states which followed on books such as
Benedict Anderson's Imagined Gommunities (1983) has recently turned toward interest
in transnational relations, including Britain's relations with its European neighbors.
Thus, for instance, Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever's The Literary Channel: The InterNational Invention of the Novel (2002) explores fiction's contribution to a liminal
"Channel zone" of literary exchange between Britain and France (2), while Roberto M.
Dainotto's Europe [in Theory] (2007) invokes Edward Said's opposition between East and
West to posit a supplementary tension between Northern and Southern Europe.
Engaging with this field from the perspective of poetics, Christopher M. Keirstead's
Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism expands on the precedents
of Matthe\v Reynolds in The Realms of Verse, 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of NationBuilding (2001) and Herbert F. Tucker in Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse 1790-1910 (2008).
The "challenge" of his title, informed by theories of "rooted cosmopolitanism"
(5), involves the twofold need to "negotiate national identities and aesthetic traditions
within a larger European cultural matrix" while cultivating "an impulse of self-criticism"
that "guarded against overinvestment in notions of progress—and o\'erindulgence in
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