This talk outlines a new literary history of British Asia, examining the emergence of anglophone literature within its earliest communities and cultural institutions through translocal and regional frameworks. By redefining anglophone writing in India as constituted by multi-sited forces, this talk alters the prevailing focus on reciprocal exchanges between Britain and its colonies. Instead, the emphasis is on the overlooked contributions of eighteenth-century military men and low-level colonial administrators, whose newspaper verse, travel poetry, and theatrical dramas—often dismissed as bad, boring, or mediocre—played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Indian literary culture.
These works are situated within an institutional chronicle of “cultural company-state,” a term describing the British East India Company’s role in patronizing and censoring the mechanisms that created eighteenth-century India’s multilingual reading publics. Highlighting the translocal imagination of these literary productions, the talk critiques the dominance of “British” and “anglophone” as conceptual categories and calls for rethinking postcolonial studies. By interrogating the artistic infrastructure of colonialism, Mulholland reveals its enduring effects on the academy and argue for methodological shifts to address the politics of postcolonial studies, the impoverished institutionalism of literary criticism, and the need to engage more deeply with the regional and local dynamics of empire. This approach revises the historical understanding of British imperial literature but also challenges its twenty-first-century academic frameworks.
James Mulholland is Professor of English and Associate Head of English at North Carolina State University. He is the author of Before the Raj: Writing Early Anglophone India (Johns Hopkins, 2021) and Sounding Imperial: Poetic Voice and the Politics of Empire, 1730-1820 (Johns Hopkins, 2013). His work has also appeared in PMLA, ELH, MLQ, Oral Tradition, Profession, The Guardian, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Public Books, and has been supported by the ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, the Marion Jasper Whiting Foundation, and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He is the winner of the Srinivas Aravamudan Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has been honorably mentioned for the MLA William Riley Parker Prize and ASECS Louis Gottschalk Prize and James L. Clifford Prize.
This talk is part of The Global Eighteenth Century Speaker Series co-sponsored by the Gipson Institute and the Global Studies Program.
