39. Insurgent Empire (with Priyamvada Gopal and Salil Tripathi)

Priyamvada Gopal talks to Salil Tripathi about her latest book, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019). Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom.

Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire.

Priyamvada Gopal is a Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Churchill College. Her main teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical race studies. Her published work includes Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence (Routledge, 2005),  After Iraq: Reframing Postcolonial Studies (Special issue of New Formations co-edited with Neil Lazarus) and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Salil Tripathi is a Bombay-born writer based in New York. He is the author of Offence: The Hindu Case (2009), The Colonel Who Would Not Repent ((2015), and Detours: Songs of the Open Road (2016). His next book is about the Gujaratis. He chairs PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee. Salil studied at Sydenham College in Bombay and Dartmouth College in the US, and has been a correspondent in India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and worked at human rights organisations in London. His journalism has won awards in India and abroad. He writes for Mint and Caravan.