Colonization

Write a critical essay in which you engage with the following question:

To what extent were the interior lives of colonizers and colonies, particularly when examined on an individual level, shaped by a similar emotional history that was never rhetorically made public?

Your goal is to read and analyze Guha’s “Not at Home in Empire” and LIN Zexu’s “Letter of Advice to Queen Victoria” (1839) and answer the research question in light of the readings. Think about the experience of British colonial officers in India that was marred by a sense of anxiety and how that differs from the all-powerful image of “the colonizer” that the British had publicly put forward. Similarly, examine the sense of unrest and frustration in Zexu’s letter to Queen Victoria that similarly highlights an undercurrent of emotions that differed from the self-sufficient, ethnocentric and prideful image the Chinese tried to maintain. After critically examining each piece in its own right in relation to colonial emotional history, engage with this idea of colonizer and colonized both sharing a similar spectrum of emotions that differed from those constructed by each respective nation and made rhetorically public.

In exploring this research question, please articulate some of the historical and cultural specificities of experiences of colonization or the situations prior to actual colonial experiences in Southeast Asia. Consider, for instance, stating what the two works have in common in terms of how each piece addresses underlying emotional currents that were preserved and contained by both colonizers and colonies. Then you may want to move onto articulating comparable but different aspects of the two works, or vice versa.

Requirements:
(1) 3 pages, excluding Works Cited; double-spaced; 12 pt. Times New Roman font; one-inch margins
(2) Make sure that you have pagination and an effectively appealing title.
(3) You MUST use citations from the readings, and please use parenthetical citations: e.g. (Russell)
(4) within your essay, you must articulate why exploring this question is important and what it does in contextualizing and making sense of colonial history in the region