Reading China-India Encounters in Colonial Literary Circuits

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

China-India contact during the colonial period – a long-understudied subject – has attracted increased scholarly attention in recent years, in parallel to the popularity of works such as Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire (2012) and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy (2008-2015). The mode of this attention, however, has been largely historiographical. Literary scholarly attention continues to be predominantly focused on pre- or non-colonial forms of spiritual, cultural, and material exchanges between China and India.

This panel brings distinctly literary perspectives to bear on China-India encounters in the colonial period. Among other questions, we ask how literary readings of texts can interact with – and shed new light on – historiographical narratives of China, India, and the British Empire’s triangulated relationships.

Mangalagiri focuses on the colonial prison cell in a collection of Chinese and Hindi literary texts, and maps the aesthetics of imprisonment emerging from the dynamic power relations between Chinese revolutionaries and Indian enforcers of British colonial law. Looking beyond the Chinese and Indian national borders, Shen reads the Chinese-Singaporean writer Zeng Shengti’s memoir on his participation in Gandhi’s “Non-Cooperation Movement,” positioning Zeng within the contexts of Sinophone literature and comparative romanticisms. Extending outwards still, beyond Asia, Lee focuses on the figure of the coolie in Caribbean texts, exploring the Caribbean as a site of forgotten intimacy between India and China from where new possibilities for postcolonial theoretical concepts arise. Taken together, the papers present novel literary approaches to studying encounters between China and India within global networks of colonial circulation.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Adhira Mangalagiri, University of Chicago

Chair

• Anand Yang, University of Washington

Individual Presentations

• China-India Colonial Configurations and the Aesthetics of Imprisonment - Adhira Mangalagiri, University of Chicago

• Sinophone Construction of the Romantic Self in the Context of China-India Exchange - Shuang Shen, Pennsylvania State University

• Slaves, Coolies, and Subalternity: Racial Triangulations in the Literary Caribbean - Amy Lee, University of California, Berkeley

Discussant

• Anand Yang, University of Washington