Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Priyamvada Gopal: INSURGENT EMPIRE. How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire

Who ended the British Empire? Priyamvada Gopal, who teaches at
Churchill College in Cambridge, puts her focus on the colonial
subjects as she 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. Much
has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and
European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims
to freedom and self-determination. 


Gopal’s highly influencial and valued book 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 has calmly and authoritatively produced this
impressive study of resistance against Empire, in the face of the
kind of constant hostility that only serves to reminds us why her
work is so urgent in the first place. We all owe her a debt.”–
Afua Hirsch, author of Brit(ish)  


Priyamvada Gopal is University Professor in
Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English and
Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge. She is the
author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the
Transition to Independence and The Indian English Novel: Nation,
History and Narration.  


Tessa Szyszkowitz is a journalist, writer and
historian currently working for Falter, profil & Cicero. Her
last book was Echte Engländer, Britain & Brexit (2018). She
is also Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services
Institute in London.  


Recorded at Kreisky Forum, May 3, 2022