Hear Our Voices: An Interview with Radhika Natarajan
How Do You Talk About Anti-Imperial Struggle With Kids? (And Other Big Questions)
We are so thrilled to welcome our old friend, historian Radhika Natarajan, to the conversation. Radhika released a children’s book Hear Our Voices: A Powerful Retelling of the British Empire Through 20 True Stories, co-authored with Chao Tayiana and illustrated by Alexander Mostov. Albert knows Radhika from their graduate school days; today, she’s a professor of modern British Empire at Reed College, researching migration, citizenship, and the welfare state in the twentieth century. Known for her warmth, generosity, and sharp intelligence, Radhika brings both rigor and humanity to her work—and we’re honored to share this interview with her.
This book is a model of meticulous research, remarkable for the breadth of its geographical and chronological sweep. Beginning in the seventeenth century with Tejonihokarawa, the Mohawk leader who travelled to London, and culminating in the twentieth century with George Manuel, the Indigenous Canadian activist, it spans more than three hundred years of imperial history.
By weaving together the voices of twenty figures from across five continents, it offers readers a uniquely global perspective on the British Empire. The range is astonishing—not only in the diversity of its subjects, from queens and poets to activists and diplomats, but also in the way it traces the Empire’s far-reaching impact across time and place. The result is a work that feels both expansive in scope and attentive to detail, opening up new ways of understanding a history that continues to shape our world today.
Many readers come to this newsletter seeking a deeper understanding of Taiwan. (Thank you!! We love you for that.) Like the stories shared below, the unsung struggles of Taiwan’s past—its diverse Indigenous communities and its long history of colonization under five different regimes—have too often been neglected. By highlighting Radhika’s book, we hope to emphasize the links between Taiwan’s Indigenous and anticolonial resistance and similar movements around the world. Her model feels like the right one: broad in its multiethnic scope, and united through the shared struggle against empire.
Albert: This is such a wonderful book! You did so much research for it.
Radhika: Yes, I did extensive primary source research and read a lot of secondary sources. This book is totally an academic work that is translated for an 8 to 12 year old audience. [Laughter]
Michelle: Do you have any models for this book?
Radhika: Not exactly a model, no. But you’ve probably noticed how popular those big biography anthologies have gotten over the last ten years. They all tend to follow the same pattern—there’s some overarching theme, and then inside you get these double-page, beautifully illustrated spreads on different figures. What struck me, though, is that almost all of them are organized around an identity category.
So, you know, it’s “25 awesome people of a certain ethnic or racial identity,” or “30 trailblazing women.” This book borrowed that familiar format, but it flipped the frame—it used the British Empire as the common thread. What ties the figures together here isn’t identity in the narrow sense, but the shared experience of imperialism. I think that makes it feel really different, even though the form may look familiar.
And the other spark didn’t even come from a book, but from children’s literature scholars. They helped me understand how history often gets misrepresented when it’s told to kids, and that really stuck with me.
Michelle: Can you say more about that? What did you discover from the children’s literature scholars?
Radhika: There’s just so much fascinating work out there that really pushes back against how biographies get written for kids. For instance, Rudine Sims Bishop was huge for me—she argued that children’s literature should first and foremost affirm kids, especially Black children. In her book Free Within Ourselves, she outlines five concrete ways adults should choose books for Black children.
I came to Bishop through Ebony Thomas, Debbie Reese, and Kathleen T. Horn’s essay, “Much Ado about a Fine Dessert.” That piece really opened my eyes to how children’s books can gloss over slavery or the violence of the past, and why that matters for their understanding of the present. It pointed me straight to Bishop’s work.
And then there’s Noreen Naseem Rodriguez and Amanda E. Vickery’s article, “Much Bigger Than a Hamburger.” They helped me think about how you frame individuals in relation to broader social and political movements—and it made me think hard about how those neat, tidy stories about the Civil Rights Movement can actually hide the fact that so many of those struggles are ongoing.
What really struck me from these works was how often children’s books shrink huge historical movements down to a single person. For instance, when it comes to the Civil Rights Movement, so many books just tell the story through Rosa Parks. And if you do that, you lose the sense of the broader movement—it erases the collective. So this is not to say that Rosa Parks isn’t important, but rather, rethinking biographies forces us to ask how are we explaining how historical change happens to children?
That was something I kept thinking about while I was writing. The other point they make is that biographies are often told as heroic narratives. And the risk there is that if you frame it as “look at this one amazing person who fixed things,” it can end up suggesting that racism or injustice is all in the past. Rosa Parks sat on a bus seat and—poof—problem solved.
But if you’re a child reading that today, trying to make sense of your own world and the injustices you see around you, that’s not really honest. So the question for me is: how do you tell these stories in a way that doesn’t flatten history or wrap it up too neatly? Because once you simplify the past like that, it changes how kids understand both history and the struggles that are still ongoing.
Michelle: How did you go about tackling those problems in your own stories and vignettes?
Radhika: The book is really meant to be a history of the British Empire told through individual lives. But instead of treating these people as heroes, I wanted to flip the question a bit: how can their stories open up broader dynamics of empire, or highlight pivotal moments in imperial history?
That was one way I tried to move away from the “great man” or “hero” story. It’s not that I don’t think these figures did important things—they did—but I wanted to ground them in their communities, in their nations, in the broader struggles they were part of. Another scholar whose work influenced my approach to this project was Jodi Byrd. One of the arguments in Transit of Empire is that the history of Indigenous nations is not reducible to colonialism; colonialism is only one slice of a much larger whole. I wanted to tell how these individuals’ lives intersected with the British Empire and also gesture to a broader reality for their communities and nations. Another strategy of broadening the story of the British Empire beyond the intentions and activities of imperialists was to provide connections between the figures. One example is the link between Sophia Duleep Singh and Gandhi—how Gandhi actually looked to the women’s suffrage movement in Britain for strategies. Or with Eamon de Valera, where you see the Irish nationalist movement actively supporting the Indian nationalist cause.
Albert: Some people might wonder if kids who are 8 to 12 are just too young to learn about the British Empire. Why do you think it’s important to introduce it to them at that age?
Radhika: I think what I’ve learned—not just from writing the book, but from actually sitting down and talking with kids and their teachers about these histories—is that children can really take in a lot, as long as it’s framed in the right way and you help them make sense of it.
So, maybe an eight-year-old isn’t going to sit down and read the whole book cover to cover. But they might read one story about an individual, and that’s enough to spark thinking. The key is giving them the context they need. You need to set up what they’re about to hear, and then be ready to explain or answer their questions as they read.
And that’s part of why I think of the book as something you can come back to. A child might dip into it at first, then return to it later and get more out of it as they grow. For example, when I went into a local school and read with third graders, I shared five of the stories. The first one I read was about Olaudah Equiano (written by Chao Tayiana).
Before we started, I talked with them about the transatlantic slave trade. I asked what they already knew, and then I prepared them for what they’d see in the story. We even began with a looking exercise: “What do you notice about this image?” The illustrations [by Alexander Mostov] are amazing for that. They pull out the central themes in a way kids can really connect with. The Equiano image is one of my favorites because you see him writing, but you also see the ship in the background, so you get this immediate sense of him as a man of the sea.
Then we used the picture as a jumping-off point. We asked the kids what they thought might happen in the story, or what questions they had. It was a way to keep them engaged and thinking ahead. At the end, we talked through the harder parts: how Equiano was kidnapped, sold into slavery, endured the Middle Passage, and eventually had to buy his own freedom.
The students asked some really thoughtful questions. One of them was about what it actually meant that he “bought his freedom.” I think that moment really gave them a much clearer sense of what slavery was, in very concrete terms.
Michelle: What did the students already know about slavery?
Radhika: They knew of slavery, but their understanding was very U.S.-focused. They were thinking about the enslavement of African Americans by white people. I was there as part of their Black History Month activities, so they had read some books about slavery and had a kind of broad, general picture.
Albert: What’s surprised me, now that I’m reading more books to P., our five-year-old, is just how dark and grown-up a lot of children’s books actually are. The squeamishness tends to be on the side of the adults, not the kids. Maybe that’s because adults have a deeper sense of how horrific some of these things really were. But children can handle it.
Michelle: P.’s current favorite book is The Boxcar Children, where the parents are dead. She’ll actually tell people, “I like books where the parents are dead.” We realized when we reread it that it’s also an extremely capitalist book. Albert hates it. So we’ve been trying to nudge her toward The Railway Children, but she refuses. [Laughter]
Since she only seems to like stories where the parents are either dead or in danger, we explained that in The Railway Children the father was arrested because he was a socialist. She immediately asked, “What’s a socialist? He went to prison for that?” So we explained it to her in simple terms: if someone has twenty houses and someone else has no house, you help the person with no house. And she just looked at us and said, “Why would he go to jail for thinking that?”
So I guess my question is this: is there a limit to how much of this—these horrors of injustice—we should be teaching children? How does a parent navigate that? Because right now, our child still thinks in very black-and-white terms: bad guys go to prison, the police put them there.
Albert: I think she got that from Paw Patrol.
Radhika: Oh no! [Laughter] I do think you have to be appropriate, and there are definitely things that are too complicated to explain fully to children. Finding that line—being honest, and also being appropriate—is one of the hardest parts of talking with kids about history
One thing I’ve learned from reading scholars of children’s literature is that you always have to keep the audience in mind. These are kids. So the stories should ultimately affirm them—their identities, their communities, their sense of their own family histories. For me, that’s the number one goal of children’s literature, and it’s something scholars of African American children’s books have really emphasized. If you start from that principle, then it’s easier to figure out what details are appropriate and which ones actually serve that purpose of affirmation and education.
In the book, for instance, I think of William Cuffay and Claudia Jones. Both of them were incarcerated, and both of their stories connect to the way radical politics have so often been criminalized. We do mention that they were imprisoned, but it’s a small part of the narrative. What I really hope comes through is the importance of the multiracial working class, and the idea that the struggle for fairness and justice is long, that it’s brought people together across generations, and that it’s still going on today.
Having William Cuffay’s story from the 1840s alongside Claudia Jones’s story from the 1950s shows that long arc. And I think when you’re deciding what’s appropriate, it helps to zoom out from the individual details and focus on that bigger picture. That’s what I tried to do.
Albert: I really love that. One of the things that struck me when I was reading the book was just the sheer scope chronologically. There was such breadth of learning. How did you land on twenty characters? Why that number?
Radhika: Well, the publishers actually had an original plan for twenty-five figures. They already had an illustrator lined up, and I should say I have a co-author, Chao Tayiana. They went to her first, and she said she’d take on the Africana figures but didn’t feel comfortable writing the broader project. That’s when they brought me in.
At first, the publishers wanted to include imperialists like Edward Colston, David Livingstone, and Cecil Rhodes. The idea was to set their stories alongside people resisting empire. They also wanted the book organized by region—North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia—but without Britain. And that really bothered me, because it made those places look sealed off from one another, which goes against the entire trend within the field of British imperial history of the past three decades. You know, the whole point is to bring out unexpected connections. So I pushed for a chronological organization that revealed those links, and they agreed.
Chao and I went ahead and wrote up the five imperialist figures, but when we turned in the draft, the editors decided to cut them. And that’s how we ended up with twenty people. They’re not all people of color, but they are all either anti-imperialists or people who lived under empire, rather than the imperialists themselves.
Michelle: We wanted to ask about a few of the specific stories. One that really caught my attention was Saadat Hasan Manto. I especially loved this description—it feels like the kind of passage I’d want to read to my child, just to show them that you can play with different genres and make those choices as a writer:
“I didn’t want to write romantic fantasies or historical melodramas. I wanted to capture the truth of the times that we were living through, even the hard and painful things that others avoided.”
I think that’s so moving. Was he someone you planned to write about from the start? And how did you choose him?
Radhika: When the editors first came to me about the book, the one figure they were absolutely sure about was Gandhi. They even already imagined his story centering on the Salt March. I was fine with that, but I also felt strongly that we couldn’t end the story of Indian independence with Gandhi and the Gandhian movement—we had to address Partition. So I started looking for a figure who could carry that story.
A friend suggested Saadat Hasan Manto. I had read a couple of his short stories before, but I didn’t know him well, so I had to learn more. And the way he writes about leaving India is just heartbreaking. He was forced out because he was Muslim, and he tells this incredibly moving story about saying goodbye to his best friend. In that moment, the enormity of Partition suddenly comes down to something as intimate as two friends being separated.
I also love how the illustrator, Alexander Mostov, captured that scene of farewell. It makes Partition feel personal and immediate. That whole profile came together almost serendipitously, and in the end it worked so well for the larger story we were trying to tell in the book.
Michelle: I really love this line from the book: If we had been caught up in the moment—he was a Hindu, I was a Muslim—if we had been caught up in the moment, could we have harmed each other?
Radhika: Heartbreaking. I think the stories included in the book ask us to think about the possibilities of solidarity across difference. The two figures I knew I wanted from the very beginning were Claudia Jones and George Manuel.
Claudia Jones was such a sharp critic of empire, and her life really ties together the Caribbean, the U.S., and London. She lived those connections And of course, because she founded the Notting Hill Carnival, her story gave us this chance to end the book on a note of joy—with a party, really. I loved that, because it reminds us how important celebration is in political movements. And Alexander’s image for that spread is inspired by photographs of carnival and brings to life the way Caribbean migrants made space for joy in London. Ending there just felt right.
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I also knew from the start that I wanted to include George Manuel. His book The Fourth World is a really important text, and I teach it in my classes. What’s so powerful about it is that it follows the mid-twentieth century moment of decolonization, when so many people were saying, “Empire is over.” But Manuel argued it wasn’t over at all, because colonialism was still very present in settler colonies like Canada.
His understanding of indigeneity was also striking. He emphasized the shared struggles of Indigenous peoples across the globe and imagined this kind of collective anti-colonial project. That perspective really shaped how I thought about the book as a whole—how these stories could fit together.
Because the figures we chose lived in different times and places, the challenge was: what connects them? What was their shared experience of empire, and how did they respond in different ways? Empire didn’t look the same everywhere, so the real question became, how do you bring these stories together through that shared confrontation with imperialism, without flattening them into sameness?
Michelle: I also wanted to ask you about Te Rangitopeora. I found her story riveting. She wrote songs cursing the people who killed her sisters and became part of an indigenous movement in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Radhika: Yes, her story felt like such a good opportunity to include the Pacific, and specifically to talk about treaty-making and the role women played in it. She was a leader, a rangatira, and she actually signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. For me, it was important to have at least one story that centered on treaty-making, because treaties are so central to the history of imperialism, and the Treaty of Waitangi continues to govern relations between Maori and Pākehā today. Her story gave us that lens. Of course, there’s a lot we don’t know about her, but what we do know really sheds light on British colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand—from the Musket Wars in the North Island, which displaced her iwi (and led to them displacing others), to the signing of the treaty, and even a little of what followed. We couldn’t go into all of that in detail, but I hoped that by including her, readers would be drawn into those larger histories, and maybe want to learn more about the Treaty of Waitangi, the Musket Wars, or the history of Aotearoa New Zealand more broadly.
She’s just such an amazing figure. We even have a photograph of her, which is incredible. And in the stories people tell about her today, she’s remembered not only as a political leader but also as a poet and a great lover. I think that’s a complex and fascinating legacy.
Michelle: What children’s books would you recommend to parents?
Radhika:I really love giving books that center children, the diversity of their families, and their experiences of the wider world. For babies, two of my favorites are Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers and All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon—both illustrated by Marla Frazee. For picture books, a recent favorite, recommended by a friend with impeccable taste, is Bathe the Cat by Alice B. McGinty and illustrated by David Roberts.
I also love Wolfie the Bunny by Ame Dyckman and Zacariah O'Hora, especially for families expecting a new sibling. A book that’s very close to me, by a dear author friend here in Portland, is One Day This Tree Will Fall. It introduces kids to ecosystems and the life cycle of a forest through lyrical, evocative poetry. Another one I treasure is Between Us and Abuela: A Family Story from the Border by Mitali Perkins, illustrated by Sara Palacios, which is about an ordinary family but also addresses the injustices of the immigration system.
I could honestly go on. Two books my third grader and I both loved—ones that really showed him how an individual’s story can open a window onto history—were Grandfather’s Journey and Tea with Milk, both by Allen Say.
Albert: Last, what were your favorite children’s books growing up?
Radhika: I was a huge reader growing up, and I pretty much only read fiction—except for books about the Titanic and Pompeii, because I was fascinated by disasters. My favorite picture books were Curious George by Margaret and H. A. Rey, the Arthur books by Marc Brown, and the George and Martha books by James Marshall. It’s amazing to see how many more choices kids have today, and how many more chances there are for them to actually see themselves in books. Looking back, I do wonder if it’s significant that I was so drawn to stories with anthropomorphic animals.
When I moved on to chapter books, I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona series. And one especially important book for me was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. I realize now that the main characters, Claudia and Jamie, actually do archival research to solve their mystery—so maybe history has been a deeper, longer-lasting interest of mine than I understood at the time.
Book Club: Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo
We loved talking to you all about Patricia Engel’s Veins of the Ocean! Apologies—we made a mistake in our last email. Our next book club is Friday, October 24th 7 PM EST / Saturday, October 25th 7 AM Taiwan time. We’re going to read Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo for the October book club. After, we’ll be reading Miranda July’s All Fours, Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Percival Everett’s James. The book club is open to all paying subscribers. Thanks to our book club for their suggestions!