Kipling and Beyond: Patriotism, Globalisation, and Postcolonialism by Caroline Rooney and Kaori Nagai (review)

This timely and excellent collection of critical essays is a corrective to any supposition that Rudyard Kipling’s writings are now a thing of the past or an over-tilled ground for scholarly investigation. Even to those familiar with recent developments in Kipling studies—especially postcolonial methodologies that have complicated our understanding of the cultural hybridity, imperialism, ideological ambivalences, and artistic techniques that animate Kipling’s fiction and verse—Kipling and Beyond offers fresh perspectives on well-known and lesser known writings, inviting reflection on contemporary critical practices and potential pitfalls in our approaches to Kipling as well as more broadly to Victorian and imperialist literature. Revolving around the question “why it is that Kipling continues to be a significant literary and cultural icon together with the question of what the maintenance of this legacy variously means in [contemporary] counter-currents of postcolonialism and Anglo-American globalisation” (14), the essays in this collection, while offering a heterogeneity of voices, approaches, and arguments, are unified in illuminating the relevance of (re)reading Kipling at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many of them also explore the bizarre recrudescence of his work in post-9/11 discourses on the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, imperial melancholia, and American imperialism, as well as unexpected links between his work and that of postcolonial writers as diverse as C. L. R. James and Michael Ondaatje.

In a powerful lead essay, Benita Parry accumulates astonishing evidence of Kipling’s “Judaeophobia” to argue that the anti-Semitism permeating especially his later writings bespeaks a fear not of “something or someone disquieting through otherness and unfamiliarity” (22, 23), but of that which does not fit “established categories” and hence troubles all categories (23), a fear of the cosmopolitan that she links to Kipling’s “flight from modernity” and its complications and his consequent nostalgic evocation of a putative uncomplicated “Englishness rooted in a pastoral past” (25, 13). Arguing forcefully against recent critical efforts that read Kipling’s work “proleptically as anticipating contemporary social and cultural preoccupations” and glide over its more egregious ideological implications, Parry provides a salutary reminder of the stakes of such recuperation (25). In an admirable essay that similarly takes a renewed stand against the negative consequences of forgetting the darker sides of Kipling, Judith Plotz returns to “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) as a poem “again contending to become the new ‘national anthem’ for a triumphalist American Empire” (54), “seriously, respectfully” quoted by neo-conservatives and liberals alike in a remarkable “transvaluation of empire/imperialism” serving to “stoke American exceptionalism” (40, 40, 43). But, like postcolonial critics such as Sara Suleri, Zohreh Sullivan, and myself, Plotz also points out the ways that Kipling can and must equally be read as sounding a crucial warning of the costs and self-contradictions of empire, such as the necessary abrogation of democracy under empire, or the “cultural schizophrenia” and “constant terror of the unnameable at the very borders of control” that haunt Kipling’s writings (53).

A number of essays in this collection reveal that “while there is a sense in which an imperially chauvinistic Kipling may always be guilty as charged, his writing does not foreclose a sense that, with a twist of the kaleidoscope, with another throw of the dice, other constellations still remain and ought to remain possible” (11). Thus in intricate and sophisticated readings, Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney explore the modes of friendship and youthful masculinity operative in Kipling’s imperial narratives, while Jo Collins links the well-known articulations of terror and the uncanny in Kipling’s writings to the resurgence of his work in writings emergent from the so-called War on Terror, examining resonances between the psychically and culturally structured forms of terror and violence in both, and showing how “terror is played out in dislocated ways, which function as disavowals of alterity whilst appearing to confront what is...