This thesis examines Indian author Raja Rao’s critically neglected work. I read Rao’s production as a strategic, yet problematic, negotiation of hegemonic narrativizations of Indian history, which attempts both to propose alternative histories and deconstruct the ontology of modern western historiography. Rao’s often criticised use of essentialism in his works is here examined as a strategic deconstructive tool in the hands of the postcolonial writer. More specifically, I wish to show how his early novels Kanthapura and Comrade Kirillov resist colonial depictions of India through both linguistic and cultural structures. Rao’s stylistic negotiation is effected through a use of the English language mediated by the Indian writer’s sensibility. Both novels enforce strategies working through opposition. They provide alternative accounts counterbalancing strategic absences in the records of colonial Indian historiography while attempting to recover the voice of protagonist subalterns. In my examination of his later novels The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare and The Chessmaster and His Moves, I argue that a more effective strategy of intervention is at work. It attempts to disrupt from within the discursive features of post-Enlightenment European modernity, more specifically the premises of Cartesian oppositional dualities, homogeneous ideas of linear time, and the centrality of imperial spaces, while problematising the hybrid and heterogeneous character of Rao’s narrative.

Focusing on a period roughly from 1865 to 1900, this dissertation utilizes close readings of paintings, illustrations, photographs, and other material culture to provide a lens on the rapid political and cultural transformation of the final decades of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Visual culture played a key role as a coercive tool as postbellum planters and industrialists who eyed Hawai‘i as the first Pacific outpost in an overseas American empire developed a colonial rhetoric that obscured Native authority and visibility and touted the “inevitable” extinction of the Hawaiian race. However, many images from this period which appear to illustrate Hawai‘i’s docility in the face of American supremacy do not fall as neatly into this simple interpretative framework as we might initially assume. For instance, this project observes how figures such as Queen Emma and King David Kalākaua refused to accept the threat to their sovereignty as they themselves leveraged visual culture in resistance to American imperialism. Chapter One analyzes photographs of Queen Emma as reflections on both Victorian mourning culture and Emma’s political ascendency from 1865-1885. Chapter Two explores paintings of early Maui sugar plantations by Enoch Wood Perry, Gideon Jacques Denny, and Joseph Dwight Strong as lenses on questions of slavery, Asian contract labor, and annexation. Chapter Three provides a close reading of the anti-annexation critique in Mabel Clare Craft’s illustrated book Hawaii Nei alongside the visual and literary production of other women who depicted Hawai‘i in the years surrounding annexation. Chapter Four jumps to the mid-20th century as it examines the painted portraits of late nineteenth-century Hawaiian royalty created by Fredda Burwell Holt alongside key works of literature by her husband, John Dominis Holt, a leading voice of the “Hawaiian Renaissance” that emerged in the 1960s following the resolution of Hawaiian statehood. Overall, this dissertation embraces its case studies as necessarily multivalent and open-ended as it resists the tendency to craft a narrative in which primitive indigeneity meekly yielded to the unstoppable barrage of American imperial pressure. Together, these chapters navigate a material landscape of nineteenth-century Hawai‘i that was layered with imperial control as well as opposition.

This thesis presents a case study of letters written by black South Africans to the Aborigines' Protection Society (APS) between 1879-1888. Recognizing that previous histories of the APS have been based primarily on British correspondence, this thesis contends that including these marginalized black letters is crucial if historians are to develop a nuanced understanding of the APS in particular, and of British imperialism in general. By placing these letters within a framework of imperial knowledge networks, this thesis traces how the messages and voices of black South African correspondents traveled in letter form to England and then were disseminated in published form by the APS. This thesis demonstrates how correspondents used writing to the APS as a tool of anti-colonial resistance, as well as how the APS used their positionality to censor and control the voices of its correspondents. Emphasizing the entanglement of correspondents' resistance and adaptation with the APS's imperialist mission, this thesis presents its case study as a window into the negotiated and unstable natures of British imperialism. / Graduate / 2021-04-06