Colby College | Directory

Anindyo Roy
Associate Professor of English
English

Phone: 207-859-5279
Fax: 859-5252
Email: aroy@colby.edu

Mailing Address:
5279 Mayflower Hill
Waterville, Maine 04901-8852

Areas of Expertise:

Postcolonial Literature of the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and the Caribbean

Literature of Imperialism

Early twentieth century British novel

Critical and literary theory (Foucault, Derrida, Benjamin, Postcolonial Theories)

Professional Information

Anindyo Roy is Associate Professor in English and teaches critical and postcolonial theory, postcolonial African, Caribbean, and South Asian literatures as well as early twentieth-century British literature. His essays have appeared in journals such as Boundary 2, Criticism, Women: A Cultural Review, Colby Quarterly, Mediations and Journal X. His book entitled Civility and Empire (Routledge: London and New York, 2005) is a literary exploration of the culture of civility operating in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British colonial society. The book examines the manner in which civility came to define the ethos of the modern colonial state and emerged as a key discursive idea around which questions about education, citizenship, gender, race, labor, and bureaucratic and civil authority were negotiated. The book focuses on a wide array of colonial texts, including nineteenth-century oriental tales (e.g. Walter Scott�s The Surgeon�s Daughter), narratives about cadetship in the East India Company and about Jewish �stock jobbers,� John Stuart Mill�s Autobiography and his colonial writings, parliamentary debates about free trade, popular Anglo-Indian poetry and romances, Kipling�s imperial fiction, and the colonial stories of E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf. He is currently working on the discourse of race, inheritance and bloodlines in nineteenth-century colonial Britain, with a special focus on fiction written about �Eurasians,� people of mixed racial origin in colonial India. In 2005 he received a fellowship to work on translating Bengali fiction into English.

Publications

Civility, a normative code of behavior in 19th century Britain became a means of imposing control and effecting exclusion when transferred to the colonial world. Civility and Empire examines the manner in which civility emerged as the ethos of the British colonial state in the 19th century and formed the key discursive idea around which questions about citizenship, education, inheritance, labor, and civil authority were negotiated. The discourse of civility also provided the basis for establishing disciplinary mechanisms that were essential to managing the historical exigencies confronting the British Empire in India. The book traces the genealogy of civility in 19th and 20th century British literature that includes writers such as Walter Scott, Kipling, John Stuart Mill, E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf, and also the history of the colonial archive that includes official documents, poetry, romances, and travel narratives from this era.