[Commlist] Kipling in the News - cfp

In case you’re kicking yourselves you did not have time to submit a 
paper to this conference, we have extended the deadline to *October 18*. 
This is an interdisciplinary conference to be held between the 
Journalism and English departments at City, University of London next 
April. *It has a literary, historical and political and focus, so 
hopefully something of interest to everyone.* Details below and further 
attached.

This conference sets out to explore the importance of journalism to 
Kipling’s literary life and, in so doing, to ask larger questions about 
the relationship between journalism, empire, and decolonisation. It also 
invites meditations on the continued relevance of these questions in the 
‘post-truth’ era of the twenty-first century and in the age when our 
current Prime Minister, then Foreign Secretary, sees fit to recite ‘Road 
to Mandalay’ in Myanmar.

*Returning to the imperial metropolis*as a young writer recently 
graduated from his apprenticeship on Indian newspapers, Rudyard Kipling 
began to consolidate his literary career in London as a late Victorian 
man of letters. As he wrote his verses and stories, he did so ‘with a 
daily paper under my right elbow’, wielding this symbol of journalism as 
a talisman of his writerly authority. And understandably so; Kipling 
owed much to his years on the Lahore /Civil and Military Gazette/ and 
the Allahabad /Pioneer/, where he had documented the daily routines, 
social stratifications, and political tensions of colonial India under 
the rule of the Raj. His 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 also sometimes critical of 
– first British and then US Empires.

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 ex-foreign secretary Boris Johnson to recite 
Kipling’s nostalgic colonial words while on an official state visit 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, to crucial 
investigations into the links between milk production and typhoid, 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?

The post-Brexit resurgence of imperial nostalgia, along with recent 
movements to decolonise university and curricula, are no doubt in part 
responsible for dragging Kipling back into the headlines, and we 
especially welcome papers exploring these issues. But Kipling’s writing 
also probed other very contemporary debates about the blurring of fact 
and fiction, questions that have come not only to problematise 
journalistic practice, but also – as the recent rise of the creative or 
literary non-fiction genre suggests – to ensure its survival. If, as 
Graham Greene, another late colonial writer-journalist, once commented, 
‘novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to 
write fiction’, what is the significance of this bleed between fictional 
and non-fictional writing in the globalised context of (memories of) 
Empire and decolonisation?

We welcome *paper* *abstracts of no more than 250 words for 20 minute 
papers *that respond broadly to some of these questions. Papers might 
offer specific research and readings of Kipling as a journalist and 
writer; they might offer accounts of wider methodological and historical 
contexts; or they might explore Kipling’s continued legacy in the present.

Suggested topics to be addressed might include, but are not limited to:

  * Kipling’s journalism
  * Kipling’s influence on journalistic practice
  * Bleeds between journalistic and literary writing
  * Kipling’s literary writing produced while a journalist, particularly
    /Plain Tales from the Hills/
  * Journalism and empire: methodologies and contexts
  * Kipling and celebrity culture
  * Kipling and the Press Barons
  * Nineteenth and Twentieth Century newspapers, particularly from the
    Indian sub-continent, the UK and US
  * Kipling, South Africa and /The Friend/
  * Serial fiction in newspapers
  * Kipling, journalism and war propaganda
  * Writing against Kipling and Empire
  * Kipling and Brexit
  * Kipling and Decolonisation
  * Decolonising Kipling
  * Kipling, monuments and #Fallism
  * Kipling and feminist critique



    Please send abstracts, along with a short bio, *to Dr Sarah Lonsdale
    and Dr Dominic Davies at (_sarah.lonsdale.1 /at/ city.ac.uk)
    <mailto:(sarah.lonsdale.1 /at/ city.ac.uk)>_ and (dominic.davies /at/ city.ac.uk)
    <mailto:(dominic.davies /at/ city.ac.uk)> by 18 October 2019*.  We will aim
    to inform applicants of their acceptance by 10 December 2019.



    Keynote speakers will include *Professor Janet Montefiore* (editor
    of the /Kipling Journal/), historian of media and empire *Dr
    Chandrika Kaul* (University of St Andrews), *Professor Harry
    Ricketts* (University of Victoria, author of /The Unforgiving
    Minute:/ /A Life of Rudyard Kipling/), and the novelist and
    postcolonial critic *Professor Elleke Boehmer *(University of
    Oxford). Conference registration will be available at a rate of
    £20.00 for waged and £10.00 for unwaged scholars. Modest travel
    bursaries for those attending from outside of London will be
    available. Please indicate in your abstract submission if you would
    like to be considered for one of these bursaries.

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