Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, colonial/imperial, feminist, gender, religion, sexuality
Abstract
This paper is a study of the impact of Rabindranath Tagore on the US suffragist, Clara Bewick Colby. In the 1910s, Colby relied on the writings of Tagore to critique both male desire and Western imperialism. Although tinged with a perspective of romantic Orientalism, Colby’s study of Tagore raises the larger question of whether such romantic Orientalism permitted a space for more cosmopolitan thinking in the US suffrage movement. In any case, Colby’s engagement with Tagore demonstrates the extent to which US suffragists reached beyond the confines of the “republican tradition” to conceptualize their emancipation.
Keywords
Colby, Tagore, Orientalism, religious liberalism
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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Romantic Orientalism in the U.S. Woman's Rights Movement
This paper is a study of the impact of Rabindranath Tagore on the US suffragist, Clara Bewick Colby. In the 1910s, Colby relied on the writings of Tagore to critique both male desire and Western imperialism. Although tinged with a perspective of romantic Orientalism, Colby’s study of Tagore raises the larger question of whether such romantic Orientalism permitted a space for more cosmopolitan thinking in the US suffrage movement. In any case, Colby’s engagement with Tagore demonstrates the extent to which US suffragists reached beyond the confines of the “republican tradition” to conceptualize their emancipation.