The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies) - Softcover

Burton, Professor Of History And Catherine C And Bruce A Bastian Professor Of Global And Transnational Studies Antoinette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822340712 ISBN 13: 9780822340713

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Santha Rama Rau was one of the best known South Asian writers in postwar America. Born into India's elite in 1923, Rama Rau has lived in the United States since the 1940s. Although she is no longer well known, she was for several decades a popular expert on India. She provided an insider's view of Indian cultures, traditions, and history to an American public increasingly aware of the expanded role of the United States on the world stage. Between 1945 and 1970, Rama Rau published half a dozen books, including travelogues, novels, a memoir, and a Time-Life cookbook; she was a regular contributor to periodicals such as the New Yorker, the New York Times, McCall's, and Reader's Digest.

Drawing on archival research and interviews with Rama Rau, historian Antoinette Burton opens Rama Rau's career into an examination of orientalism in the postwar United States, the changing idioms of cosmopolitanism in the postcolonial era, and the afterlife of British colonialism in the American public sphere. Burton describes how Rama Rau's career was shaped by gendered perceptions of India and "the East" as well as by the shifting relationships between the United States, India, Pakistan, and Great Britain during the Cold War. Exploring how Rama Rau positioned herself as an expert on both India and the British empire, Burton analyzes the correspondence between Rama Rau and her Time-Life editors over the contents of her book The Cooking of India (1969), and Rama Rau's theatrical adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, which played on Broadway in 1961 and was the basis for David Lean's 1985 film. Burton assesses the critical reception of Rama Rau's play as well as her correspondence with Forster and Lean.

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Antoinette Burton is the Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies in the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Among her books are the collections Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History; Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (with Tony Ballantyne); and After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, all of which are also published by Duke University Press.

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"In "The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau," Antoinette Burton produces a notably intelligent and counterintuitive reading of the forgotten and/or trivialized genealogies of colonial/postcolonial cosmopolitanism. Focusing on the career of a putatively minor writer with a complex relationship to the project of decolonization, Cold War politics, U.S. civil rights movements, and corporate publishing, Burton re-inflects the ways we have been accustomed to thinking about gendered professionalism, celebrity status, minoritization, and the history of postcolonial theory. What is most impressive is the way that she manages to make something densely textured and timely out of materials that might otherwise be relegated to antiquarian interest alone."--Parama Roy, author of "Indian Traffic: Identities in Question in Colonial and Postcolonial India"

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The Postcolonial Careers of Santha Rama Rau

By ANTOINETTE BURTON

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4071-3

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.......................................................................................................................viiiACKNOWLEDGMENTS.............................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION The East as a Postcolonial Career..............................................................................................11. Cold War Cosmopolitanism: The Education of Santha Rama Rau in the Age of Bandung, 1945-1960..............................................322. Interpreting British India in Anglo-America: The Cultural Politics of Santha Rama Rau's A Passage to India,1960-2005.....................713. Home to India: Cooking with Santha Rama Rau..............................................................................................109EPILOGUE Cosmopolitanism by Any Other Name..................................................................................................145NOTES.......................................................................................................................................153SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................................195INDEX.......................................................................................................................................209

Chapter One

Cold War Cosmopolitanism

The Education of Santha Rama Rau in the

Age of Bandung, 1945-1960

We drove past the conference building and saw the flags of the twenty-nine participating nations of Asia and Africa billowing lazily in the weak wind; already the streets were packed with crowds and their black and yellow and brown faces looked eagerly at each passing car ... to catch sight of some prime minister, a U Nu, a Chou En-lai, a Nehru ... it was the first time in their downtrodden lives that they'd seen so many of their color, race and nationality arrayed in such aspects of power, their men keeping order, their Asia and their Africa in control of their destinies.-Richard Wright, The Color Curtain

When Santha Rama Rau burst onto the international literary scene in 1945 with her first book, Home to India, she was just twenty-two years old. Over half a dozen books and half a century later, she was anthologized in a Norton reader as a writer, a writing teacher, and the prototypical cosmopolitan of the twentieth century: "born in Madras, India ... [she] lived all over the world, from England to South Africa to Japan, until she settled in the United States." Rama Rau's transformation from fledgling author into the embodiment of the modern cosmopolitan ideal was largely a function of her elite status, her family connections, and the opportunities available to her as an educated Indian woman. The daughter of a diplomat-father and an activist-feminist mother, she had all the credentials of the classic cosmopolite, including a transnational childhood lived across the spaces of the British Raj and an equally mobile adulthood facilitated by marriage to an American and a career as a travel-writer. Though she did not recognize herself as exceptional, she conceded that her contemporaries might find her life "odd, peculiar, even a little mad ... or exotic." Exoticism was, of course, a fate to which many formerly colonial people who aspired to a cosmopolitan identity were subject in the decades following the breakup of the British empire. But Rama Rau's story does more than reveal the possibilities and limits of cosmopolitanism. Taken together, the books she produced in the wake of her travels in the 1950s articulate a shifting vision of global community: from an earlier, Eurocentric model-rooted in a British and imperial worldview-to a pan-Asian model-rooted in the realization of an emergent America-centered global hegemony. Like most if not all women's travelwriting, Rama Rau's work demonstrates how the sentimental journey of development articulated in the travelogue helps to shape a gendered narrative of political education-in this case, that of a privileged Indian woman in a newly, if unevenly, "postcolonial" world. It also enables us to see with particular vividness the intersection of a historically specific form of cosmopolitanism with the realities of the late-twentieth-century world order as symbolized by the 1955 conference in Bandung-that historic gathering of non-aligned states that marked an attempt by "Third World" nations to declare independence from Cold War politics -and to appreciate the role of India, and Indians, as sites of translation between one Anglophone empire (Britain) and another (the United States).

As we will see, Rama Rau was not always comfortable confronting this "reality" or discovering that she was, by virtue of being Indian at a particular world-historical juncture, expected by many she encountered to identify both with an all-Asia identity and an American-realpolitik view of the future. Specifying Rama Rau's unease as she encountered, lived, and tried to work through the shifting ground of cosmopolitanism in a decolonizing context reminds us of cosmopolitanism's spatial and temporal contingencies-a historical dimension which has been curiously neglected in recent debates about the utility of "cosmopolitics" in a putatively postnational world. Indeed, although there is general agreement that cosmopolitanism is "a very old ideal," there is little work that actually historicizes the long career of the concept, let alone its embodied subjectivities. Its transnational appeal has been accompanied, in other words, by a presumption about its transhistorical character. To be sure, more democratic expressions of cosmopolitan identity-made visible by the self-conscious appropriation of a historically elite model for the subjects of diaspora, transnationalism, and "flexible citizenship"-are at the heart of a host of recent global research agendas. But what Kumkum Sangari calls "the pressure of historical placement" weighs very lightly on many of the accounts of cosmopolitanism, whether narrative or analytical, that are being produced in the context of a globalizing academic culture.

Perhaps less surprisingly, attention to the ideological and material work of gender in marking out cosmopolitan spaces and constituting cosmopolitan subjects has also been remarkably scant. Historians interested in international women's movements, especially in the early twentieth century, have made visible the cosmopolitan circuitry of transnational feminism in a global framework, drawing attention in the process to the unequal power relations between East and West which consistently undergirded the systems of political power created by this global feminist imaginary. But cosmopolitanism in all its complexity, variety, contradiction, and instability has not been entertained as a category of historical analysis in this work, even though doing so might enable the deparochialization of women's and feminist history that Mrinalini Sinha, Donna Guy, and Angela Woollacott have called for. Nor have those invested in reclaiming cosmopolitanism for public debate or postnational political projects been particularly attentive to its gendered character, either historically or now. This neglect has to do in part with the fact that the revival of interest in cosmopolitanism as an object of intellectual investigation has...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822340712
• ISBN 13: 9780822340713
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 232
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande