Next class, we will be discussing the excellent
anthology EMPIRE WRITING. I will not be assigning individual sections or
themes. Instead, this handout is intended to illustrate the themes we will be
addressing, and you should use this to guide your reading. I want you as you go
to pick out passages, extracts, quotes, that illustrate and try to address
these issues. If one particular issue comes up blank, don’t worry –
but just use these notes as a working basis for approaching a fairly long book.
Oh – and don’t forget the question we raised in an earlier class:
What do we find in literary sources of this kind that we are unlikely to find
in official documents?
1.Regions Caesar never
knew / Thy posterity shall sway
Why did the empires happen?
What did imperialists want?
What did they get from these
empires that surprised them?
What historical models and
examples shaped imperial expectations? How far were these past examples and
analogies valid?
Ideas of empire are dynamic
rather than static. How do they evolve in the period under discussion? (Hint:
note the movement during the period from simply commercial motives to exalted
ideas of High Imperialism, Christian mission, Second Roman empire, etc etc)
Do we see signs of the later
idea that the European powers are ruling to train up their subject peoples to
prepare for self-government?
Is empire a uniform pattern,
or how does it vary from place to, place? Does imperialism have degrees?
2.Lords of Human Kind
What are the passages you
find that best indicate colonial attitudes?
What are the religious
justifications for colonialism?
Where does colonialism emerge
at its best?
Where does colonialism emerge
at its worst?
How are our attitudes
affected by the nature of our sources?
3.The Pink Bits
How were the colonies meant
to solve the problems of the home lands?
How does the empire serve as
a release valve for the metropolitan societies?
How did the imperial
experience affect conditions and attitudes back home?
How do people evolve an idea
of life in the colonies as wild, free, and often more authentic than life in
the crowded homeland?
4.The Colonel’s lady
and Judy O’Grady/Are sisters under the skin
Women found themselves in an
ambiguous position, as members of the master race, but within a patriarchal
setting. How do colonial circumstances affect concepts of gender?
Tell me about the ideology of
masculinity in the colonial setting?
Tell me about the ideology of
femininity in the colonial setting?
How did the colonial setting
affect attitudes towards sexuality? How rigid a barrier did racial frontiers
constitute?
5.”The Horror! The
Horror!”
What evidence do we see of
guilt, doubts or qualms about colonialism? On what grounds?
How do Westerners come to
idealize and/or romanticize the colonial worlds, especially the “Mystic
east”?
6.Voices from Below
How did colonized people
respond?
What evidence do we see for
resistance by the colonized?
Tell me about the varied
reactions we find among literate subject peoples – resistance,
adaptation, imitation….
How do ordinary peoples in
the subject lands see or interact with their rulers?
What is the religious impact
of this interaction?
Do the empires tend to
produce reactions that ultimately doom them? How? Is empire its own
gravedigger? Note how the British and other Europeans create the potential for
new nations and new nationalisms
7.The Empire in Black and
White
Simplistic stereotypes to the contrary,
European empires were complex societies with many intervening stages between
pure imperial overlords and native peasants. What were these stages? Think
about the role of merchants and compradors, mixed race communities, marginal
races and peoples, Jews and Syrians…. How did lines of race and color
float and vary over time?
What evidence do we see of imperial activity
by Britain’s own “subordinate tribes”, like the Irish and
Scots?
What impact would these marginal groups
have on the rise of nationalism and the movement towards independence?
What are the particular problems faced by
white colonials, eg the settler populations in societies like Australia and
Canada?
How do people struggle to maintain the
notion of Whiteness? Can this status be lost? How? What happens to those who
fall short of it?
7.Orientals and Ornaments
In recent years, academics have written
about two ways of approaching colonialism, orientalism (famously) and more
recently, ornamentalism. What do the terms mean? What passages can we find here
that illuminate or contradict these ideas?
How do these readings reflect
the insights of post-colonial theory, eg about the essentializing of the
subject peoples?
Do we see evidence of scientific
foundations for racism? How does this mesh with what we already know about
ideas of evolution and degeneracy in this era?
8.Broadening the Story
This book focuses on the
British experience. How do you think conditions would have been seen
differently from the perspective of other great imperial powers, such as
France, Germany, Italy, and so on.
How different was the
American experience? Does our understanding of imperial and colonial attitudes
help explain US attitudes towards subject races, eg American Indians and above
all blacks?
Should we see “the
West” as the US equivalent of the common European concept of the empire?
Is “manifest destiny” much more than just an American peculiarity?
Note also how black
nationalism in the US grows out of and often borrows from nationalisms within
thee British empire, especially in the Caribbean. Ie, in many and various ways,
the European empires do have a direct impact in the US
9.The Empires Strike Back
What impact did war have on the empires? Why did they eventually decline and fall? How far can we see the seeds of decline in the writings you have here?
How do imperial attitudes and
conflicts reflect back on European and global events and controversies,
especially during and after the two world wars?
How did the imperial
connection shape the changing ethnic and social character of the metropolitan
countries from the 1950s onwards?
Does modern racism have its
roots in the ideas and events we are studying here?
Should we see Zionism –
which is so central to modern Middle Eastern politics – as an aftershock
of European and specifically British imperialism? (And if not, why not?) What
would this analysis mean for our understanding of the Middle East?
10. Some Individuals
There are also some authors
who tend to dominate this book. Tell me about the following, what they wrote,
and why they matter:
Olive Schreiner
H. M. Stanley
Rudyard Kipling
Claude McKay
Joseph Conrad
Flora Annie Steel
In conclusion, I quote the wonderful scene from John
Boorman’s 1987 film Hope and Glory: The scene is set in a London
school during the 1940 blitz. A teacher points to an atlas that has covered the
blackboard: "Right...what are all the pink bits?..., yes Martin?"
"Don't know Miss"
"Granger?"
"They're ours Miss"...
"Quite right, Granger. The Empire...two fifths of the
world...and that's what this is all about. Men are out there fighting and dying
to save all the pink bits for you ungrateful little twerps".