Kipling in the News
Co-convened by Dom Davies and Sarah Lonsdale, and with the generous support of the Kipling Society, ‘Kipling in the News’ was hosted at City, University of London on 9-10 September 2021.
Rudyard Kipling's experience as a journalist and colonial correspondent honed his distinctive, concise prose style, and it is this pithiness that accounts for his enduring legacy in the twenty-first century as a writer often in support of – but occasionally critical of – first British and then US empires. At a time when both pervasive imperial nostalgia and movements to decolonise the university are dragging Kipling back into the news, this conference explored the importance of journalism to Kipling's literary life and, in so doing, ask larger questions about the relationship between journalism, empire, and decolonisation. It also invited reflections on the continued relevance of these questions in what has been characterised as our "post-truth" era.
If the cramped newspaper spaces trained Kipling to write words that ‘tell, carry, weigh, taste and, if need were, smell’ of British India, what does it mean for Boris Johnson to recite Kipling’s nostalgic colonial words while on an official state visit as foreign secretary to Myanmar in 2017? And if Kipling’s journalism ranged from undoubtedly orientalising ‘colour’ pieces, to variously crude though sometimes profound meditations on whiteness and imperialism, what does it mean for University of Manchester students to graffiti over his words and replace them with those of Maya Angelou on the wall of their student union in 2018? How did Kipling, a man whose literary career began in and with the news, come to be such a frequent feature of it, both at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first?
Conference Programme
Day 1, Thursday 9th September 2021
09.00-09.30 Registration
09.30-11.00 Keynote 1
Chandrika Kaul: “What do they know of Kipling who only Kipling know: Mediascapes of Empire”
Introduced by Sarah Lonsdale
11.00-11.30 Tea & Coffee
11.30-13.00 Panel 1: Journalism & Fiction
Chair: Andrew Lycett
Élodie Raimbault, ‘“Tell it as a lie”: the Ambiguous Blend of Fiction and Journalism in Kipling’s Many Inventions’
Angela Eyre, ‘“Tods Amendment”, the Native-born Child, and Debates Over Tenancy Legislation’
Minna Vuohelainen, ‘Rudyard Kipling’s Imperial Gothic short fiction and the periodical press
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.30 Panel 2: Translating Kipling
Chair: Howard Booth
Harish Trivedi, ‘Kipling and the Indian Vernacular Press: Countering The Pioneer’
Mohammad Saleem, ‘Shaking Off the Colonial Burden: Revisiting Resistance Literature in India during British Rule’
Monica Turci, ‘Rudyard Kipling in Antonio Gramsci’s Journalism’
15.30-16.00 Tea & Coffee
16.00-17.30 Panel 3: Empires
Chair: Kaori Nagai
Vinita Dhondiyal Bhatnagar, ‘Opium, Empire and the Orient: Reading Kipling in the Context of Narcopolitics’
Aaron Ackerley, ‘Rudyard Kipling, the Press Barons, and Visions of Empire’
Dominic Davies, ‘The Kipling Scrapbooks and the End of Empire’
17.30-18.00 Wine Reception / Short Break
18.00-19.00 Keynote 2
Elleke Boehmer, “Kipling’s Currency: a Conversation” with Dom Davies
19.30 Conference Dinner at Dame Alice Owen, St John Street (restrictions allowing)
Day 2, Friday 10th September 2021
09.30-11.00 Keynote 3
Harry Ricketts: “Following Kipling’s Footsteps in Rajasthan”
Introduced by Jan Montefiore
11.00-11.30 Tea & Coffee
11.30-13.00 Panel 4: Newspapers & their Owners
Chair: Sarah Lonsdale
George Simmers, ‘The Fun of Fake News: “The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat” and “Dayspring Mishandled”’
Howard Booth, ‘Rethinking Kipling’s First World War propaganda: the case of France at War’
David Richards, ‘Kipling & The Friend: Boers, Badges, and Bibliography’
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-15.30 Panel 5: Kipling’s Literary Legacy
Chair: Dominic Davies
Jill Didur, ‘Reimaging Kipling: Mixing Fiction and Journalism in The Kipling File’
Sarah Lonsdale, “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken mansplained back to you’: Feminist Parodies of Kipling’s ‘If.’’
Gary Enstone, ‘Living with Rudyard Kipling and his legacy in a 21st Century World’
15.30-16.00 Tea & Coffee
16.00-17.30 Keynote 4
Janet Montefiore: “Run and find out’: Rudyard Kipling as junior reporter’
Introduced by Dominic Davies
