Imperial boyhood: Representations of empire and adolescence in Rudyard Kipling's fiction

"Imperial Boyhood: Representations of Empire and Adolescence in Rudyard Kipling's Fiction" proposes the "empire boy" as a site of inquiry for a decolonizing cultural critique. Outlining first the socio-cultural history of boyhood's representation, the text then offers extended readings of The Jungle Books, Stalky & Co. and Kim. The analysis reveals that the "empire boy," the organizing figure Kipling employs to articulate his envisioning of the British imperial project, serves yet disrupts, assets yet subverts, imperial authority and ideology.; Chapter one establishes the genealogy of the "boy," retracing the socio-cultural, historical process that constitutes and invests the figure, examining the articulation of childhood and the production of a privileged boyhood within the social text of imperial Europe. Chapter two focuses on the Mowgli saga of Kipling's Jungle Books, examining the liminal wolf-boy as the organizing figure in an allegorization of empire. Mowgli's jungle Bildung is shown to restage, allegorically, the history of the British in India. Organizing itself, most saliently, upon various allusions to the scenes and situations of the 1857 Indian Mutiny, the Mowgli saga works, not altogether successfully, to resolve imperial anxieties investing that historical event. Chapter three, on Stalky & Co., examines the "empire boy" in the context of the English school, revealing how Kipling disrupts the conception of an insular metropolitan culture, by opening this "centre" to the influences and inscriptions of the imperial "periphery." Kipling's schoolboy manifests an irresolvably ambivalent subjectivity; he is, ultimately, an imperial hero who bears an unsettling resemblance to the colonial subjects he dominates. Chapter four examines the hybrid Kim as an imperial agent. The first part of the argument employs Foucauldian theory to apprehend Kim's place and role within the disciplinary order of empire represented by the "Great Game." Noting preliminarily the unpredictable, potentially destabilizing effects of Kim's multivalent "ethnicity," the argument proceeds with an analysis of the ethnographic implications of Kipling's text, an analysis that reveals the hybridized boy to be the ambivalent agent and the intractable object of imperial power-knowledge.