Gretchen Murphy
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814795989
- eISBN:
- 9780814759592
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814795989.003.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Media Studies
This chapter examines the U.S. reception of Rudyard Kipling's poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899), in a variety of forms such as newspaper opinions, scientific treatises, political speeches, and ...
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This chapter examines the U.S. reception of Rudyard Kipling's poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899), in a variety of forms such as newspaper opinions, scientific treatises, political speeches, and parodies. This examination demonstrates that rather than intensifying Anglo-Saxonism or a racialized linkage between whiteness, U.S. nationalism, and overseas expansion, the poem instead exacerbated anxieties about the meaning and importance of whiteness for a U.S. global mission. While some satirists demonstrated the poem's hypocrisy by pointing out the onomantithesis in Kipling's binary treatment of black beneficiaries and white servants, for some readers Kipling's binary was not deceptively reversed but troublingly collapsed in a context where the meaning and stability of whiteness was in question. As part of the inquiry into racialization and empire building, the chapter shows the importance of literature both in scripting and in interrogating fictions of racial identity.Less
This chapter examines the U.S. reception of Rudyard Kipling's poem, “The White Man's Burden” (1899), in a variety of forms such as newspaper opinions, scientific treatises, political speeches, and parodies. This examination demonstrates that rather than intensifying Anglo-Saxonism or a racialized linkage between whiteness, U.S. nationalism, and overseas expansion, the poem instead exacerbated anxieties about the meaning and importance of whiteness for a U.S. global mission. While some satirists demonstrated the poem's hypocrisy by pointing out the onomantithesis in Kipling's binary treatment of black beneficiaries and white servants, for some readers Kipling's binary was not deceptively reversed but troublingly collapsed in a context where the meaning and stability of whiteness was in question. As part of the inquiry into racialization and empire building, the chapter shows the importance of literature both in scripting and in interrogating fictions of racial identity.
Marie-Paule Ha
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9789622099456
- eISBN:
- 9789882206687
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789622099456.003.0011
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
In the nineteenth century, a sizeable Chinese labor cum trade diasporic community was established in Indochina, where they occupied a dominant position in the local economy until the arrival of the ...
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In the nineteenth century, a sizeable Chinese labor cum trade diasporic community was established in Indochina, where they occupied a dominant position in the local economy until the arrival of the French. Upon the completion of colonial conquest and pacification in the 1880s, the French embarked on the mise en valeur of their new possession by setting up a state-sponsored and state-backed “imperial diaspora.” This chapter discusses cultural practices of the Chinese and the French in Indochina, and shows that the Manichean schema not only fails to account for the complexity of the colonial reality, it has also created a form of the “White Man's Burden” that differs in an interesting way from the one eulogized by Rudyard Kipling, the British imperial bard.Less
In the nineteenth century, a sizeable Chinese labor cum trade diasporic community was established in Indochina, where they occupied a dominant position in the local economy until the arrival of the French. Upon the completion of colonial conquest and pacification in the 1880s, the French embarked on the mise en valeur of their new possession by setting up a state-sponsored and state-backed “imperial diaspora.” This chapter discusses cultural practices of the Chinese and the French in Indochina, and shows that the Manichean schema not only fails to account for the complexity of the colonial reality, it has also created a form of the “White Man's Burden” that differs in an interesting way from the one eulogized by Rudyard Kipling, the British imperial bard.
