Imperial Citizens: Nation, Empire, and Narrative

FAIN: FT-54794-07

Sukanya Banerjee
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI 53211-3153)

This project examines the narrative registers along which Indians articulated claims to citizenship across the late nineteenth-early twentieth century British Empire. By reading a range of texts—fiction, autobiography, official reports—the project analyzes the rhetorical idioms through which Indians formulated their status as citizens, a category that was commonly denied to colonial subjects. Highlighting the imaginative and thematic registers through which colonial subjects formulated notions of political equality, the project foregrounds the narrativity of citizenship, tracing its articulation across a range of late-Victorian sites, such as that of political economy, bourgeois morality, female professionalism, and bureaucratic modernity.