Babel Study Guide

R.F. Kuang was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1996. She immigrated to the United States with her family when she was four years old and was raised in Dallas, Texas. She then went on to attend college at Georgetown University. Kuang published her first novel, The Poppy War, in 2018. The Poppy War is a fantasy novel that is loosely based on events in mid-20th century China, with a focus on the Second Sino-Japanese War. Kuang graduated from Georgetown that same year. After graduating, Kuang received a Marshall Scholarship to study at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She then earned a master’s degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford, after which she became a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Kuang followed The Poppy War with two sequels, The Dragon Republic in 2019 and The Burning God in 2020. Kuang then published Babel in 2022, followed by Yellowface, a novel of literary fiction that satirizes the publishing industry, in 2023. Babel won the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Babel focuses on the history of colonization by the British Empire. The British Empire reached the peak of its power in the 19th and early 20th centuries. During those years, the British Empire became the largest empire to ever exist. The roots of that empire, especially as it relates to Babel, date back to 1757, when Britain gained a colonial foothold in India after the British East India Company, a large corporation with its own armed forces, militarily defeated the Nawab of Bengal, who was the ruler of Mughal India. (Mughal India was an early modern empire in South Asia, occupying parts of what are now India and Bangladesh). After that battle, the British East India Company controlled much of India until 1857. During that time, the British East India Company used its armed forces to subjugate people in India and force them to do the company’s bidding, which led to several violent conflicts. The British East India Company also trafficked enslaved people. When demand for Chinese goods in England greatly outpaced the demand for British goods in China (where the British East India Company also operated), the Company grew opium in India to sell illegally in China in order to offset the trade deficit between Britain and China. The increase of opium in China led to widespread issues with addiction in the country. The British response to the Chinese government’s attempts to enforce its prohibition against importing opium eventually led to the First Opium War, fought between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty. That war began in September of 1839, and the end of Babel occurs on the brink of the conflict. Several chapters also tell a fictionalized version of the lead-up to that war.

Babel is a fantasy novel inspired by historical events. Kuang takes a similar approach in her first three books, which make up the Poppy War trilogy. Those books are The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, and The Burning God. Kuang has also cited two novels in particular when discussing the works that influenced Babel, namely Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The Secret History features an academic setting that is similar to Babel’s, and Tartt’s novel has been cited as one of the first examples of the “dark academia” subgenre in which Babel is often categorized. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is an alternate history novel that also contains elements of fantasy, reminiscent of Babel. Several chapters in Babel also begin with epigraphs and quotations from other authors. One of the authors quoted in those epigraphs is Frantz Fanon, who was a writer and theorist from Martinique whose work often focused on the harms of colonization, the necessity of decolonization, and the tactics by which decolonization could be achieved. Like several characters in Babel, Fanon advocated for the liberation of all colonized people. Some of Fanon’s most well-known books include Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon analyzes the role that language plays in the inequitable power structures with a focus on the oppression of Black people by White colonizers. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that colonized people have the right to use violence to fight for liberation, an argument that is similar to the one that is used by Griffin and Robin in Babel.