Sahibs with Black Faces? - Installing and Escaping Whiteness in Rudyard Kipling's “Kim“

Abstract or Introduction

In recent years, more and more attention has been drawn to the study of whiteness, that is, to the way in which whiteness – the state of being of white complexion, and, therefore, of the “white” race – is perceived, both by whites and non-whites, as a race-category, and, ultimately, as a fact; and how this perception came about, how it was constructed – and to what end. Authors like Richard Dyer, among others, have begun deconstructing what has become the commonly accepted perception of white image1, and white self-image, and have found out that whiteness, as a race-category, has, over centuries, been constructed, by white authors and white authorities the world over, into something that has assumed an almost normative function – representing a racial “norm”, used to compare, distinguish and ultimately separate those who deviate from the norm, and thereby installing a device of control and, at its heart, a white, Eurocentric view of the world. Alongside their discoveries, scholars like Eric Lott have begun turning their interest to a different question: if, as Dyer had stated, the construction of whiteness was a means of establishing power, then what reason was there for white people to impersonate nonwhites, a phenomenon that had come to broader attention in the early 19th century with the emergence of minstrelsy and so-called “blackface”-performances? In this paper, I will give a short overview on the theories of Eric Lott and David R. Roediger regarding this point and, set before the background of these theories, present a reading of Rudyard Kipling's novel “Kim“ in which I will try to determine in how far the protagonist - a young orphan living on the streets of Lahore, India - is constructed as a white person, to what extend he may be said to be using “blackface“, in what manner he profits from these two facts, and, ultimately, what might be derived from this regarding the construction of white – non-white identities and relations in the novel.

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1 In “White”, 1997