Rudyard Kipling's final novel, Kim (1901), begins with an intriguing – if paradoxical – description of the eponymous Kim, or Kimball O'Hara: he is an “English” boy with an Irish name and Irish parentage who speaks “the [Indian] vernacular by preference” (1). While the narrator hastens to reassure the reader that Kim is both “white” and “English,” Kim is also “burned black as any native” and speaks his supposed “mother tongue,” English, in an “uncertain sing-song” (1). If we are to take Kipling's assertion at face value, that Kim is, indeed, “English,” then certainly this is a kind of Englishness that is divorced completely from the racially pure ideals of Anglo-Saxon whiteness that were privileged by many racial theorists earlier in the nineteenth century. As an Irish Celt, Kipling's protagonist is always already at a layer of remove from ideals of pure Englishness, but Kipling renders Kim's racial identity even more complicated in the text. The manuscript of Kim gives us some telling clues about the contexts that inform Kipling's peculiar descriptions of “burned black” whiteness in his finished novel. While the published text baldly declares that “Kim was English. . . . Kim was white” (1; ch. 1; emphasis mine), parts of the manuscript are much less certain of this fact, as that document asserts that Kim “looked like a half caste” (Kipling, Kim o’ the ‘Rishti n. 3). And while Kipling ultimately removed this explicit link between Kim and Eurasian bodies in the opening of his published text, this disavowal is neither complete nor convincing throughout Kim. For instance, in the novel, the narrator later describes a “half-caste woman who looked after [Kim . . . and] told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister” (1; ch. 1). While this woman is not, in fact, the boy's aunt, Kim's near-familial tie with her underlines the intimate connection between him and the hybridized subjects of empire. Indeed, Kim demonstrates ideological and affective links to non-white Others and to people of mixed race, and this connection between whiteness and racial hybridity is of central importance to Kipling. If Kim is tenuously white, then he can only perform this whiteness in immediate proximity to racial hybridity, with which whiteness is ideologically contiguous in this text. As I contend in this paper, Kim reveals the under-examined links between early twentieth-century ideas of white British identity and descriptions of imperial miscegenation. In Kim, “White” and “English” emerge as a vexed pair of signifiers that reveal unprecedented traces of racial and national hybridization.

中文翻译：

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一个“白人男孩”。. . 谁不是白人男孩”：RUDYARD KIPLING 的 KIM、白人和英国身份

拉迪亚德·吉卜林的最后一部小说,金（1901 年），以对同名金或金博尔·奥哈拉（Kimball O'Hara）的有趣描述（如果自相矛盾）开头：他是一个“英国”男孩，有爱尔兰名字和爱尔兰血统，说“偏爱[印度]白话”（ 1）。虽然叙述者急忙向读者保证金既是“白人”又是“英国人”，但金也“像任何本地人一样被烧黑”，并在“不确定的歌声”中说着他所谓的“母语”，即英语（ 1）。如果我们从表面上看吉卜林的断言，即金确实是“英国人”，那么这肯定是一种完全脱离了许多种族理论家所享有的盎格鲁-撒克逊白人的种族纯粹理想的英国性早在十九世纪。作为一个爱尔兰凯尔特人，吉卜林的主人公总是与纯英国人的理想脱节，但吉卜林在文本中使金的种族身份更加复杂。的手稿金为我们提供了一些关于吉卜林在他完成的小说中对“烧黑”白度的特殊描述的背景的有力线索。虽然发表的文字大胆宣称“金是英语. . . . 金是白人”（1；第 1 章；强调我的），手稿的部分内容对这一事实不太确定，因为该文件声称金“看起来像半种姓”（吉卜林，Kim o' the 'Rishtin. 3）。虽然吉卜林最终在他发表的文本的开头删除了金和欧亚身体之间的这种明确联系，但这种否认既不完整也不令人信服金. 例如，在小说中，叙述者后来描述了一个“照顾 [Kim . . . 并且] 告诉传教士她是金的母亲的妹妹”（1；第 1 章）。虽然这个女人实际上不是男孩的姑姑，但金与她近乎家庭的关系突显了他与帝国混血臣民之间的密切联系。事实上，Kim 展示了与非白人其他人和混血儿的意识形态和情感联系，而白人和种族混血之间的这种联系对吉卜林至关重要。如果金是微弱的白人，那么他只能在接近种族混血的地方表现出这种白人，在本文中，白人在意识形态上是连续的。正如我在这篇论文中所说，金揭示了 20 世纪早期关于英国白人身份的观念与对帝国通婚的描述之间未被充分研究的联系。在金，“白人”和“英国人”作为一对令人烦恼的能指出现，揭示了前所未有的种族和民族杂交痕迹。