Dec 8, 2017

British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion

Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects

Sheshalatha Reddy

Hosted by Kathleen DeGuzman

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Summary

Sheshalatha Reddy's British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) examines historical and literary texts relating to three rebellions in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 in India, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 in Jamaica, and the Fenian Rebellion of 1867 in Ireland. The book argues that these rebellions---while arguably unsuccessful in their particular moments---signaled turning points in the management of labor throughout the British Empire. As the disciplinary methods used by imperial forces shifted in the nineteenth century---for example, the abolition of slavery and the rise of wage labor---so too did the resistive practices of the colonized. Drawing from a rich variety of primary sources ranging from political economic tracts to photographs and poems to novels, Reddy highlights the complex dynamic between laboring bodies and oppressive political and economic structures amid shifting forms of biopower. Sheshalatha Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Howard University in Washington D.C., where she teaches British and Anglophone colonial and postcolonial literatures. In addition to authoring British Empire and the Literature of Rebellion: Revolting Bodies, Laboring Subjectsshe has edited Mapping the Nation: An Anthology of Indian Poetry in English, 1870-1920 (Anthem Press, 2012) and published articles in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Victorian Literature and Culture.

Kathleen DeGuzman is an Assistant Professor of English at San Francisco State University. Her teaching and research focus on Caribbean literature, Caribbean and British cultural entanglements, and the novel. She is completing Small Places: The Anglophone Caribbean, Victorian Britain, and the Forms of Atlantic Archipelagoes, a book project that aligns the Caribbean and Britain through their shared geographical reality as archipelagoes.