Copyright by Jeanette Marie Herman 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Jeanette Marie Herman certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Empire’ s Bodies: Images of Suffering in Nineteenth and Twentieth -Century India and Ireland Committee: Mia Carter, Co -Supervisor Lisa Moore, Co -Supervisor Elizabeth Butler Cullingford Barbara Harlow Sharmila Rudrappa Empire’ s Bodies: Images of Suffering in Nineteenth and Twentieth -Century India and Ireland by Jeanette Marie Herman, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2004 Acknowledgments When I think about the history of this project over the past four years, the images that come to my mind are the faces of the many friends without whose support this work would not have been possible. I have been truly privileged to work with a committee of women who have consistently challenged me in my thinking and writing and who are in different ways my model s for the kind of scholar I aspire to be. I will never be able to adequately express my gratitude to my co -directors, professors Lisa Moore and Mia Carter, for their guidance and support on so many levels. Mia’s critical engagement and thought-provoking feedback have helped shape this project from its earliest stages, her commitment has taught me about what it means to gracefully combine scholarship and activism, and her generous, warm encouragement has been important to me throughout this process. From Lisa I have learned so much about feminist teaching and scholarship, and I am deeply thankful to her for reading my work so thoughtfully and offering such insightful comments, for making community and collaboration a central part of her teaching practice, and for knowing exactly what to say when I’ve needed support. I am indebted to Barbara Harlow for so much, from the model of politically invested and historically grounded scholarship she has provided, to the ways she has both challenged and encouraged me in my own work, to the multiple ways she has supported my professional development. Being a part of the community Barbara has fostered through the Ethnic and Third World interest group has enriched my experience as a graduate student, and I feel very fortunate to have had such an intellectually vibrant, iv engaged community as I have been writing. Elizabeth Cullingford’s course on Northern Irish literature helped shape my ideas for the hunger strikes chapter, and I am grateful for her expertise and her gene rous feedback on all of my chapters. The first time I met Sharmila Rudrappa, I turned up unannounced at her office asking her to be on my committee, and I left carrying a stack of books she had lent me. I am thankful to Sharmila for such generosity, enth usiasm, and collegiality, which she has continued to offer at every step. This project has benefited in countless ways from the wonderful, brilliant members of my dissertation group, who have read long drafts without complaint and always offered thoughtfu l, incisive feedback: Ellen Crowell, Alexandra Barron, Ashley Shannon, and Jacquie Thomas. I am especially grateful to Ellen for helping me find the most interesting parts of my own arguments, for working with me on job market materials, and for her frie ndship, which I treasure. Alex has been a sweet and caring friend and a generous reader, whose comments have been both thought-provoking and encouraging, and she has also been part of another group of friends and peers with whom I have been fortunate to d iscuss the content of two of my chapters. Our South Asian literature reading group—Alex, Miriam Murtuza, Lynn Makau, and Vinatha Vasudevan —provided a forum for discussing partition literature, sati , and a variety of other texts and issues, as well as a sp ace for exchanging ideas. My particular thanks to Miriam for sharing her expertise and reading an early draft of my partition chapter. I cannot imagine what the past several years would have been like without the love and support of my friends. I want to thank Sue Mendelsohn for helping me through v a difficult time with such unflinching kindness and honesty. My thanks to Eve Dunbar for going through the stressful last month of dissertation writing with me and for helping me prepare for my defense, and my thanks to Eve, Lee Rumbarger, and Jennifer Williams for helping me celebrate when it was finished. I am grateful to Susan Pelle for inspiring talks over coffee about work, books, and movies, and for being a friend with whom I can pick up mid -conversati on even if we haven’t seen each other for months. My thanks also to Neelum Wadhwani, George Waddington, Ashley Shannon, Eric Lupfer, Victoria Davis, Camile Pahwa, Vimala Pasupathi, Colleen Hynes, Kerri Sheehan, Corrie Stokes, Jeff Jackanicz, Matt McClung, and Lisa Storie. Finally, I am grateful for the support of my family, especially my mom, Marty Herman, whose love and strength I appreciate and admire, and my dad, Chris Herman, who taught me so much about enduring hardships with dignity, about standing up for my convictions even when he didn’t share them, and about refusing to quit or give up. He would have been proud to see me finish this dissertation. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE The Sati’s Body: Corporeal Images of British India in the Sati Debate, Mainwaring’s The Suttee , and Steel’s On the Face of the Waters 31 CHAPTER TWO Dismemberings and Remembering: Women’s Narratives of India’s Partition 133 CHAPTER THREE Famine Bodies and Colonial Boundaries: Abjection, Shame, and Guilt in Representations of Ireland’s Great Famine 246 CHAPTER FOUR Prisoners’ Bodie s, Discourses of Rights, and Gendered Political Participation: Representations of the Northern Irish Hunger Strikes 349 EPILOGUE 437 WORKS CITED 444 VITA 455 vii Introduction In recent days, an unusually large number of Romans have been gathering around the statue of Pasquino…. The statue, named after a local curmudgeon, was put up in 1501, and Romans have been posting lampoons on it ever since. There are several pasquinades up now…. The most biting one so far is a collage of the now famous image of an Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghr aib, standing on a box with wires protruding from under his black shroud. In the pasquinade, however, his right arm is raised and he holds up Lady Liberty’s eternal flame. —John Seabrook, The New Yorker, 7 June 2004 On 28 April 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes II broadcast several photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. These images and those from the progressively more troubling photographs that have since circulated in print, on the television news, and on the In ternet have become imprinted in the popular imagination: besides the image John Seabrook references in his New Yorker article, there are images of Iraqi men with hands and ankles bound and heads covered with hoods; of naked men tied together, piled in pyr amids, or forced to pose in sexual postures; of a female American soldier holding a leash tied to a naked prisoner’s neck; of the same soldier pointing to the genitals of hooded, naked prisoners lined up against a wall; of American soldiers grinning at the camera while posed next to Iraqi corpses. Whereas earlier reports of torture in Iraqi prisons operated by the U.S. military yielded little public interest, the publication of these photographs stirred emotions in the U.S. and internationally, evoking res ponses ranging from outrage and disgust to shock and shame. The photographs and the visceral reactions they produce have instigated public discussion not only of the practices of torture they record, but also of the images 1 themselves: their power to move the public where words failed; the potential for their publication to incite further violence in Iraq; their ability to “tell it all,” as one article puts it, 1 or to function as transparent windows to truth; their relationship to other images, whether photographs of Ku Klux Klan lynchings, pictures of the 1968 massacre at My Lai, or pornographic images; their use as tools for interrogation, as messages for circulation; their portrayal of America and Americans; their capacity to represent American “hearts,” American culture, the “truth” about who and what the nation is. As I was immersed in the last stages of writing this dissertation about past images of suffering bodies produced by the British empire in India and Ireland—images of Indian women’s bodies burning in sati rituals or raped during partition, and images of starving bodies from Ireland’s Great Famine and the North ern Irish hunger strikes —this series of photographic images from the much more recent past and from an occupying force much closer to home forced me to return to the surface of my own writing, to my own historical and political context. Looking at the Abu Ghraib photographs and listening to the public discourse that has emerged around them, I have been struck not by how new or unprecedented these images seem to be, but on the contrary by the extent to which they participate in an established history of usi ng images of suffering bodies to articulate structures of imperial domination. The photographs from what Susan Sontag in a New York Times Magazine article calls the “extralegal American penal empire” 2 at Abu Ghraib raise precisely the questions this dissertation seeks to answer through images from the British empire: Why are images of bodies in conditions of crisis so ubiquitous in representations of empire and its legacies? How do images of suffering bodies function 2 in the theatre of global politics? And what roles have images of corporeal violence as articulated through categories of gender, race, sexuality, religion, and culture —all of which circulate in the Abu Ghraib photographs—played in discourses of and about empire? This dissertation argues that images of suffering bodies, drawn from the actual conditions of empire, have functioned both to undergird and to undermine structures of domination produced by British imperialism.