Daniel E. White. From Little London to Little Bengal

Daniel E. White's book examines the cultural enclaves of Little Bengal in London and Little London in Bengal in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. White convincingly argues that the boundaries that distinguished Britain and India were blurred with print-commodity culture and public spectacles cross-connecting these locales and creating the sense that one could be in two places at once. In so doing White situates his work within the school of New Imperial History, espoused by scholars such as Catherine Hall and Antoinette Burton, which seeks to replace binary divisions between metropole and periphery by proposing that individual and collective identities in this early period of globalization were often formulated across national and proto-national boundaries. Chapter 1 begins by focusing on two forms of spectacles: panoramas that sought to replicate British scenes in colonial India and the Durga Puja Hindu festival. White argues that panoramas, which were staged in Little London in India and depicted British locales, sought to reinforce metropolitan cultural identity by offering British exiles a nostalgic transporter back to Britain. He argues, though, that panoramas could often make British exiles feel that they were in two places at once, thus subverting the distinction between metropole and periphery. When examining Britons' attendance of the Durga Puja, White writes that while these festivals were discursively deployed by Britons as examples of the religious superstitions of the “natives” they often threatened the boundaries between “black town” and “white town,” with members from both communities attending.

Archaeology · BENGAL · Colonialism · Hinduism · Modernity · Political science · Sociology · White (mutation) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies