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  • Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918 by Aaron Worth
  • Tamara Ketabgian (bio)
Imperial Media: Colonial Networks and Information Technologies in the British Literary Imagination, 1857–1918. By Aaron Worth. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2014. Pp. 176. $41.60.

Imperial Media is a timely book, straddling two burgeoning scholarly fields: the literary history of British colonialism and the cultural study of media and information technology. Spanning the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study is wide-ranging, moving from narratives of the 1857 Indian Rebellion to World War I spy thrillers, with an occasional nod to postmodern fiction thrown in for good measure. Throughout, Aaron Worth dwells on how “the links—conceptual as well as practical—between the British Empire and the information technologies with which it was associated first began to be dissociated” (p. 3).

Imperial Media is most intriguing when it explores the messy complexities of these technologies as warring networks subject to reverse colonization and decolonization—whether in the case of colonial telegraphic systems, modern military informatics, or a panoply of late-Victorian inscriptive and proto-cinematic devices. Of course, Technology and Culture readers should note that Worth’s approach is primarily literary and discursive. He does not offer new archival or technical conclusions surrounding media, but rather explores the cultural work of information technology as a metaphor for colonial ideology—and vice versa. His monograph yields these insights through the detailed literary analysis of late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction by Rudyard Kipling, Marie Corelli, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and John Buchan.

Worth’s text contributes to existing scholarship on Victorian literature and information systems, most notably Richard Menke’s Telegraphic [End Page 250] Realism (2007) and Thomas Richards’s The Imperial Archive (1993). It also offers a suggestive literary complement to recent science and technology studies of nineteenth-century empire, communications, and technology transfer, including the oeuvre of historian Daniel Headrick. In his intricate and sometimes abstract study of British cultural discourse, Worth focuses on popular novelists who themselves administrated, propagandized, critiqued, and enabled the modern colonial enterprise. One wonders how Imperial Media might sound if it explored indigenous or other, more culturally marginal, perspectives. For instance, Worth’s first chapter on Kipling, mutiny, and telegraphy might be profitably paired with Sukanya Banerjee’s recent study of Indian metaphors of blood and the body politic in Becoming Imperial Citizens (2010). Even so, Worth’s chapter still offers an original study of the figure of “networked native,” as it evolved from the “telegraph-smashing sepoy” (p. 6) of popular mutiny narratives into the model information worker of Kipling’s polyglot Indian fictions.

In the two chapters that follow, Worth poses his most novel claims regarding media as a fantastical metaphor for imperial space and time. Chapter 2 discusses Corelli’s Romance of Two Worlds (1886), which Worth examines as a female “cyberfantasy” of “interplanetary spirit-travel by telegraph” (pp. 41, 7), and Haggard’s She (1886), a tale of African adventure that evokes an “infinite imploded empire” (p. 58) of temporal mastery, rooted in the emergent cinematic technologies of kinetophotography. Chapter 3 addresses Wells’s early scientific romances, treating their embodied and weaponized media as satires of Britain’s Boer War and possible imperial future. Finally, the closing chapter dwells on Buchan’s early-twentieth-century writings, viewing both his novels of African imperial conflict and his later spy thrillers as allegories of cyberwar and an emerging “modern information society” (p. 94).

Imperial Media makes ambitious and polemical claims for its subject matter. Worth argues that “without … [information] technologies, contemporary systems of colonial exploitation and influence often proved, literally, unthinkable” (p. 6). It is disappointing, therefore, that this book is framed by such a brief introduction and “Coda,” neither of which do much to synthesize its more focused literary readings. At such moments, this reader would have welcomed a more conclusive and substantial account of genre (particularly imperial romance), patterns of reverse colonization, Platonic models of information, and conceptual metaphor theory—an approach that clearly undergirds Worth’s study of the “conceptual coupling” (p. 4) of information and the imperialist impulse. Instead, the book...

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