The School of English cordially invites you to attend the following seminar offered by Dr. Brian Reinken:

“All Stations Are Exactly Alike”: Déjà Vu and British Soft Power in Rudyard Kipling’s Urban Travel Narratives

Dr. Brian Reinken, Rutgers University

May 24, 2024, Friday, 4:30 p.m.

Room 7.45, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Writing after the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, a young Rudyard Kipling spent the earliest years of his career attacking the project of liberal-minded imperial reform. His urban travel narratives cultivate a sense of déjà vu to warn readers of a dismal future in which the global spread of British soft power has homogenized world cities from Lahore to London. In short stories like “The City of Dreadful Night” (1885) and The City of Dreadful Night (1889), Kipling’s reuse of titles, character archetypes, and plot lines strips travel of its novelty. These stories make it seem that every modern city has become identically corrupt, classless, and ungovernable because British institutions have exported liberal politics, capitalist economics, and English-language education to the word at large. Ultimately, the pervasive déjà vu of Kipling’s early travel writing invites a new account of cognitive mapping in the era of monopoly capitalism. Far from an ungraspable totality, the globalized world as Kipling portrays it is dismayingly small and familiar. Because every place increasingly resembles every other, travelers who have seen one city have already seen them all. 

Brian Reinken earned his PhD in English literature from Rutgers University in 2023. His research interests include British imperialism, the nineteenth-century novel, and literary form. His work has appeared, or it is scheduled to appear, in Victorian Review, ELH, Victorian Literature and Culture, and SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900.