The book commies get into one of our favorite topics this week -- liberal imperialism (well, *dunking on* liberal imperialism is one of our favorite topics, because it is very, very bad). We’re conflicted about E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), a novel with some great writing (you know, Forster) that tries to think seriously about empire’s many incoherences and oppressive structures… but that also tends to reproduce those incoherences and structures. And that does plenty of its own “orientalizing.” And then there’s the novel's extremely fraught and fucked up gender politics. (Marabar Caves, wtf.) Tl;dr Edward Said was right, again.
Speaking of Said, you can find his brilliant reading of A Passage to India in Culture and Imperialism, one of those extremely famous critical texts that very much deserves its reputation and is always worth revisiting. For more on liberal imperialism, we highly recommend Uday Singh Mehta’s Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought.
*Note to listeners: we’re actually doing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” next week. We’re saving “The Minister’s Black Veil” for a future Halloween.
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