In Which Elsie Goes to Oxford: Affective and Epistolary Internationalisms in the 20th Century

Keywords: Historical Geography; Internationalism; Archives; South Asia
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Elsie Theophilus applied for a British Council Scholarship from the city of Madras (now Chennai) in the early 1950s. She had just gotten a degree in History from Women’s Christian College (WCC), and hoped to go to St Anne’s College, Oxford for further studies. However, the British Council’s mandate at the time was to fund future statesmen (and the occasional woman) from the new Commonwealth: not, as Elsie hoped to become, teachers and researchers. So, Elsie, like many other young women in the late 19th and early 20th century wrote letters to the principal and other academics at St Anne’s College, Oxford, asking if they could find the funds to allow her to study at the institution. These letters are passionate, and in them, Elsie evokes an ethic of friendship located within an internationalist world of women’s educational exchange. The international emerges in this archive as an object of desire, called into being through affect that circulates through networks of letter-writing. Through a micro-historical focus on Elsie’s letters, I ask in this paper how such informal networks subvert the logics of dominant geopolitical institutions like the British Council that undergirded the emergent imperialist internationalism of the Commonwealth in the mid-20th century.