The Rhetoric of English India

Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India is a powerful challenge to the obsession with Otherness that is a trademark of colonial studies. Where other scholars tend to observe a strict separation between works by Western and non-Western writers and between ruling and subject races, Suleri reconstructs a narrative in which English and Indian idioms play with, and against, each other. By studying a wide range of materials, from the writings of Burke to the travel logs of nineteenth-century women such as Fanny Parkes and Harriert Tytler to the fiction of Kipling, Forester, Naipaul and Rushdie, Suleri deftly reveals the complicity that always operates in colonial literature. In doing so, Suleri succeeds not only in challenging the standard chronology of imperial history, but also in fundamentally recasting contemporary discourse on the theories of cultural empowerment.