It would be understandably easy to assume that the drive for multicultural awareness is a recent phenomenon, spurred on by a combination of increased knowledge and awareness of other cultures and a heightened sensitivity brought on by political correctness, but this is not necessarily the case. Authors both past and present have looked to other cultures as sources of inspiration for their great works, and while their attempts to portray peoples from other places and cultures have not always been accurate, their use has opened readers' eyes and piqued their curiosities to worlds and lifestyles far different from their own, yet not nearly as far away as one would imagine.
This is not to say that every cross-cultural encounter depicted in literature is positive, just as not every case of it in reality is. The sad truth is that historically speaking, many intercultural encounters have been those of war, strife, and subjugation. It has long been a maxim of mine that history is written by the winners, more often than not to justify their treatment of the losers. Literature also often follows this rule. One need look no further than the British Empire to see the relationship between ruler and subject expounded and justified in fact and in fiction.
But it is occasionally through such writings, and a deeper exploration of an author's ethnocentrism and nationalism, that a new perspective on intercultural relations can be witnessed. Such is the case in the writings of Rudyard Kipling. Although Kipling's most famous work, The Jungle Books, has long been relegated to the status of children's literature, those familiar with Kipling know that he was a fierce nationalist and staunch supporter of British imperialism. Armed with this knowledge, Nyman (2001) reexamined Kipling's work as an allegory of British colonialism. The results were intriguing.
Nyman's theory revolves around the idea that not only is the relationship between the animals and the humans in The Jungle Books is an allegory of that between the British colonies and Britain itself (a theory I myself have noticed in the various stories what make u the novel), but also the very nature of the jungle itself as an allegory. By itself, the jungle is chaotic, lawless, and deadly, and needs a set of rules placed over it to bring order out of chaos. It is the character of Baloo the bear who teaches these laws to Mowgli, the human boy who finds himself orphaned and adopted by a pack of wolves.
As Nyman puts it, “one of the main issues in the text is the conflict between orderly colonialism and anarchic nativism. When the bear teaches the wolf people the principles of the Law of the Jungle, Kipling's text seeks to construct culture in the natural space of the jungle, contributing to the colonialist project's attempt to subordinate natural to imported law.” In other words, The jungle represents the undeveloped world, which requires law and order to be imposed on it not only for the subjects themselves to thrive (for Baloo teaches the Law of the Jungle to all the animals) but so that England (represented by the human – Mowgli) can civilize it through subjugation.
This is exactly what happens in the Mowgli stories of The Jungle Books: Mowgli's adopted wolf pack, seduced by the tiger Shere Khan's promises of fresh food, turn away from the Law of the Jungle and betray Mowgli. It is only after Mowgli temporarily returns to the human world that he finds the tools to defeat Shere Khan on two separate occasions: First, by scaring the tiger away with fire (stolen from a nearby village), and finally killing him in a later story by trampling him with a stampeding herd of cattle (stolen form the same village). With Shere Khan dead and his native influence broken, Mowgli returns to the wolf pack which had adopted and rejected him, and assumes leadership. Thus is England, armed with English tools and ideals, able to bring law and order to an untamed land in order to rule it.
Kipling's untamed nationalism is not confined to The Jungle Books, but is a constant theme in much of his work. Indeed, it is his imperialistic streak which colors two of his more famous poems, “Gunga Din” and “The White Man's Burden.” “Gunga Din,” a narrative poem from the point of view of a British soldier in India, who at first mocks the titular water-carrier, but later praises him when he saves the soldier's life at the cost of his own, is described in Benet's Reading Encyclopedia as “an extremely well-known poem, like much of Kipling's work, it strikes the modern reader as paternalistic, racist, and reflecting the jingoism of the era.” These qualities were downplayed, but by no means eliminated, when “Gunga Din” was made into a major motion picture in 1939. The film version casts a suspicious eye on British imperialism, making the “villains” a bit more sympathetic than audiences would have been used to from films of the genre, as Jaher (2008) notes in his examination of the film. 'You have sworn as soldiers, if need be, to die for your country, your England. Well, India is my country and my faith, and I can die for my faith and my country as readily as you for yours.' These are the words, not of an Indian nationalist hero, but of the "Thug Master," arch villain in the film.
Jaher opens his review with these words to show how Hollywood ( and by extension, America) was growing disillusioned with Imperialism and saw the first glimmers of virtue in an independent India.
Jaher goes on to explain that while the British in India had been a popular theme for exotic adventure movies of the day, “Gunga Din” was different because “Suddenly a film in this series was introducing reservations about the British Empire and implicitly recognizing the legitimacy of the impulse toward Indian independence, which had dramatically intensified during the 1930s.” Released in 1939, during the early days of WWII, didn't help matters either: “The film also prefigured American sympathy for this impulse, a sympathy that would cause wartime controversy between London and Washington.” Put simply, with India struggling for independence, and with the world witnessing the potential rise of a violent new imperialism in the Nazis, Hollywood was, as Jaher put it, “ready to look more critically at British hegemony. America had become a superpower; Britain, weakened in World War I, was already in decline. The modification of Hollywood's British-Indian epic was imminent.” So the film version of “Gunga Din” took a slightly different turn than the original poem. Kipling, who died in 1936, most likely would not have approved.
However, from a racial/ethnic standpoint, no single work of Kipling's has drawn more criticism than “The White Man's Burden.” This poem, shortly before it was first published in 1899, was originally mailed to Theodore Roosevelt shortly after he had been elected governor of New York. Kipling and Roosevelt were personal friends at the time, and both the poem and the letter were part of Kipling's strong urge for Roosevelt to convince the US government to rule over the Philippines (which it had just wrested from the Spanish) in the same manner that England ruled over its own colonies. The theme of the poem itself is self-evident: It is “the white man's burden” to bring culture and civilization to non-white nations. As Brantlinger (2007) describes it:
In September [of 1898] he had written to Roosevelt: “Now go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines. America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears.” “The White Man’s Burden” repeated this advice, adding a more abstract message about the white race’s superiority and responsibility to the Filipinos and the other nonwhite peoples of the world.
Kipling's message may have been abstract, but there was absolutely nothing subtle about it. As Brantlinger notes, “Few poems have been more frequently cited, criticized, and satirized than “The White Man’s Burden.” It has served as a lightning rod for both the supporters and the opponents of imperialism, as well as of racism and white supremacy.” Brantlinger goes on to explain how the poem has been used by various sides at varying times in history to either condemn or justify imperial racism, even to the point of whitewashing (no pun intended) history:
In one of his columns for the New York Times, a piece entitled "The White Man's Burden", economist Paul Krugman notes that Bush and other neoconservatives who regard America's conquest and colonization of the Philippines as a model for what will hopefully transpire in Iraq might learn something if they paid attention to history. No evidence exists, Krugman says, to suggest that "control of the Philippines made us stronger" in strategic terms. And "the economic doctrines that were used to justify Western empire-building during the late 19th century. . . turned out to be nonsense. . . Calling "The White Man's Burden" "the perfect epitaph for the Bush administration", blogger Sharon Jumper adds: "Bush is such a neanderthal, however, that were he to read the poem, he would likely think it laudatory of his current policies."
Truly, those who don't know history, or worse, mistake jingoist poetry for history, are doomed to repeat it.
While nationalistic writers such as Kipling sought to promote the colonization and “Englishifactaion,” as it were, of foreign cultures, other authors, ones who, perhaps, had some experience on the business end of colonization, wrote from a different perspective. Arata (1990) discovered, hidden within the pages of arguably the most famous Gothic horror novel of all time, a chilling warning about the dangers of what he called “reverse colonization.” Put simply, as England sallies forth to bring English “civilization” to far-flung cultures, it was unwittingly inviting those same cultures back into England, where it would corrupt the culture from within. The novel in question is none other than Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.
While most people associate Dracula with Transylvania (a region in the eastern half of what is now Romania), it would surprise people unfamiliar with the story to learn the bulk of the story actually takes place in London. Count Dracula, himself a Romanian nobleman, has bought up houses throughout London, presumably to move on to greener pastures. Only a select few group of people – including Jonathan Harker, the real estate lawyer who originally sold Dracula the properties, have discovered the Count's true nature and set out on a desperate quest to stop him before he brings his “curse” into the heart of England itself.
Arata sees Dracula not only as a supernatural story, but one rife with political allegory, beginning with Stoker's choice to connect Cunt Dracula to Transylvania:
Transylvania was known primarily as part of the vexed “Eastern Question” that so obsessed British foreign policy in the 1880s and 1890s. The region was first and foremost the site, not of superstition and Gothic romance, but of political turbulence and racial strife. . . By moving Castle Dracula there, Stoker gives distinctly political overtones to his Gothic Narrative.
If we, as Arata did, see Count Dracula as a threat not because of his vampirism, but because of his foreignness, then the appeal of Dracula's horror is not just a supernatural one, but a cultural one. Count Dracula is a symbol of the foreign influences that England has all but invited into its own home which will eventually destroy it. It is then no coincidence that one of the lesser-known pieces of vampiric folklore is that a vampire cannot enter a person's home unless he is first invited inside. If Stoker had been aware of this bit of mythology (and there's no reason to believe that he did not), then his use of a vampire as his monster of choice is uncannily appropriate.
It seems very possible, as Arata suggests, that Stoker's overwhelming success with Dracula is due in part to his (either deliberate or accidental) tapping in to the political and social anxieties of his time. Halberstam (1993) takes Arata's analysis a step further by explaining how vampirism is an ideal metaphor for the weakening of England:
In Dracula, vampires are precisely a race and a family that weakens the stock of Englishness by passing on degeneracy and the disease of blood lust. Dracula as a monster/master parasite feeds upon English wealth and health. He sucks blood and drains resources; he always eats out.
But Halberstam differs from Arata by seeing Dracula as a symbol not of a foreign cultural threat, but of a subculture already present within English society, and a time-honored scapegoat: the Jews:
Dracula, then, represents the Jew of anti-Semitic discourse in several ways: appearance, his relation to money and gold, his parasitism, his degeneracy, his impermanency and lack of allegiance to a fatherland, and his femininity.
Whether the threat came from without (as Arata suggests) or within (as Halberstam suggests), Dracula can be read not as a struggle of humanity against damnation, but of the British struggling against unknown foreign forces. This, might explain how a Gothic horror novel (never a literary genre taken seriously by literary scholars) penned by an author who never saw success before or since (it should also be noted that Stoker himself was Irish, and therefore no stranger to British imperialism) somehow managed to not only touch the zeitgeist of Victorian England, but become such a integral part of our collective consciousness today.
It would be easy to see the Middle East (much of which were British colonies at one point in time or another) solely as either the victim of colonization or the retaliator, but it was, interestingly enough, an American author who decided to turn the tables by making this area the aggressor. George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails (1986) was a novel which turned the power struggle inherent in colonial relations upside-down by making the Middle East the dominant world power in the not-too-distant future. This science fiction novel was a one of the lesser-known forerunners of the “cyberpunk” sub-genre of science fiction, which focused on high technology in the hands of street-level thugs and criminals (William Gibson's Neuromancer, published in 1984, is widely credited with inventing the genre).
In When Gravity Fails, Marid Audran is a private investigator working in “The Budayeen,” a walled up quarter of an unnamed Muslim city where sin and vice is tolerated, in the near future. He is hired by one of the city's most powerful and influential people to track down a serial killer who is using cybernetic enhancements to hide his identity from the police. Although his religious beliefs prohibit it (Marid is self-described as a less-than devout Muslim), he is eventually pressured by his employer to become enhanced himself so that he may track down the killer, and eventually face him on equal terms.
It is Effinger's use of a Muslim city and culture which sets When Gravity Fails (as well as its two sequels, A Fire in the Sun and The Exile Kiss) apart from other novels of the genre, most of which almost exclusively take place in either American or Japanese locales (where the focus on technology is more easily apparent). Indeed, the European world is hardly mentioned at all in Effinger's Budayeen novels, except occasionally in passing, usually in terms of some sort of social-economic decline. As Gramlich (1996) wrote: “The book marks one of the few times that a complex, accurate, and believable Muslim world has been constructed as a backdrop for a science-fiction novel.” Many cyberpunk authors choose not to explore the moral or ethical implications of the technology in the worlds they create, preferring to have both characters and readers alike accept it without question, but Effinger was at least able to open the door into questions of how a culture as devoutly religious as Islam reacts to a world where bionic limbs, sex-change operations, and electronically-altered minds are commonly used for business and pleasure. Given Samovar's (2010) words that “Simply put, Islam is 'a total way of life, pervading every aspect of a believer's day to day behavior in the narrow sense,'” it would have been an interesting exercise if Effinger had explored the paradoxical relationship between Islam as an overarching cultural influence and the fast-paced world of the cyberpunk genre in more detail. Unfortunately, Effinger never delved particularly deeply into these questions, neither in his trilogy or in any of the other Budayeen stories and novellas he wrote up until his death in 2002.
Kipling's work is often classified (incorrectly, due in part to Walt Disney) as children's literature. Stoker is often dismissed as a one-hit wonder in horror. Effinger is often overlooked in the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. And yet, in all three authors, we see a stunning portrayal of foreign culture, often with British colonization as the backdrop. Perhaps it is precisely because these authors worked in genres which usually aren't given serious scholarly notice that they were able to smuggle in their social commentaries and vivid depictions of foreign cultures to their audiences. It has been said that the goal of an author is not so much to write a story as it is to crate a world, but it should be noted that sometime the worlds that are “created” are not nearly as far away as we think.
References
(1996). Gunga Din. Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, 435. Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.
Arata, S. (1990). The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. Victorian Studies 33(4).
Brantlinger, P. (2007). Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" and Its Afterlives. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 50(2), 172-191. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Gramlich, C. (1996). When Gravity Fails. Magill’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.
Halberstam, J. (1993). Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Victorian Studies 36(3).
Jaher, F., & Kling, B. (2008). Hollywood's India: The Meaning of RKO's Gunga Din. Film & History (03603695), 38(2), 33-44. Retrieved from Film & Television Literature Index with Full Text database.
Nyman, J. (2001). Re-Reading Rudyard Kipling's 'English' Heroism: Narrating Nation in The Jungle Book. Orbis Litterarum, 56(3), 205. Retrieved from Literary Reference Center database.
Samovar, L.A., Porter, R.E., & Stefani, L.A. (2009). Communication between cultures. Boston: Wadsworth.
Shamburg, J. (2000). D2K: Bram Stoker's Dracula and the collapse of Victorian Society at the Fin-de- Siecle. (Master's Thesis). Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ.
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