Keywords
Kuang, R.F., Swift, Jonathan, queer studies, transhistorical, Asian American Studies, decolonization, decolonizing narratives
Document Type
Article
Abstract
R.F. Kuang’s bestselling 2022 fantasy novel, Babel, is set in the years leading up to the Opium Wars and chronicles the story of a Cantonese boy who is ferried to Oxford to learn the art of translation—and eventually discovers that his academic work is a tool used by the British imperial project. Kuang’s main character names himself after his favorite writer, Jonathan Swift, and the novel takes on a queer structure that aligns with Swiftian logic. This article examines this transhistorical intertextuality and reads both Swifts together. In so doing, and drawing from queer and Asian American studies work on “sideways”ness, this article argues for a sideways reading practice. This reading practice, the article theorizes and demonstrates, orients the reader obliquely to the text, accounts for narrative nonlinearity, asides, and marginalized perspectives, and challenges the more normative, imperial systems of signification these texts initially seem to propose and ultimately refute.
Recommended Citation
Lu, Lillian
(2023)
"翻译: R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Jonathan Swift, and Sideways Reading,"
Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries: Vol. 15, Article 27.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.70213/1948-1802.1027
Available at:
https://cedar.wwu.edu/digitaldefoe/vol15/iss1/27
DOI
10.70213/1948-1802.1027