Colonial Voices

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 12 Travel, Exploration, and ‘‘Discovery’’: From Imagination to Inquiry 12Imagining Multiple Worlds: The Fantasy of ‘‘Discovery’’ 18The Narrative Organization of Discovery 29‘‘Inquiry’’ and the Documentation of the Others 41Conclusion: ‘‘Discovery’’ and Wonder, ‘‘Contracted and Epitomized’’ 493 The Discourse of Difference: Constructing the Colonial Exotic 55The Colony and Imperial Wealth 57The Exotic in English Culture 59The Colonial Exotic: Aesthetics, Science, and Difference 60The Sentimental Exotic 62The Scientific Exotic 79Conclusion: From the Indian to the Colonial Exotic 954 Empire Management: From Domestication to Spectacle 104The Domestication of Colonial Spaces 106Administering Colonial Spaces 121‘‘Raising the General Credit of the Empire’’: The Spectacle of Empire 140Conclusion: Imperial Improvisation and the Spectacle 1455 Civilizing the Empire: The Ideology of Moral and Material Progress 161England’s Age of Improvement 164Discipline and Improve 170Imperial Lessons 174The Salvific Colonial 178Rescue, Reform, and Race 183Conclusion: From Improvement to Self-Legitimization 1946 Aesthetic Understanding: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitans 201The Self-Fashioning of the Scholar-Colonial 204Antiquarian Aesthetics and Colonial Authority 213‘‘Consumption, Ingestion, and Decoration’’: Colonial Commodities 219The ‘‘Empire City’’: Pageantry and Empire 226Conclusion: From Colonial English to Imperial Cosmopolitan 229References 235Index 260