Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. While I appreciate that the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ are not synonymous and not necessarily interchangeable, similarly to the use of these terms by Williams in The Country and the City, I also refer more broadly to the British empire, but focus on particular English forms of cultural imagination linked to rural England. My focus on England is partially determined by the forma- tion of English Heritage which was established under the National Heritage Act of 1983, and partially in response to perceptions of ‘English’ being a distinct racial category. However, I have chosen to consistently engage with the term ‘contemporary Britain’ throughout this study as the more general observations about immigration and race relations as legacies of the British empire are broadly applied to Britain as a nation, even while this study implicitly acknowledges that England continues to play the dominant role within national politics. I also wish to privilege the term ‘Britain’ as a more inclusive one than ‘England’. By raising these concerns in the first half of this study, I also aim to foreground the ongoing definitional tensions and discussions around the relationship between ‘British’ and ‘English’. 2. John Major made his well-documented speech to the Conservative Group for Europe on 22 April 1993. See (Butler and Butler, 2000, 296). 3. Throughout this book, I consider Britain as a ‘postimperial’ nation, while the nation-states that formed following the demise of empire are consid- ered ‘postcolonial.’ However, there are clearly many citizens and inhabitants within Britain who continue to engage with postcolonial concerns through connections with the ex-colonies and lingering forms of racism and margin- alisation that stem from imperial ideologies. I use the terms ‘postimperial melancholia’ and ‘colonial nostalgia’ as fairly interchangeable: both relate to a sentimental, retrospective response to the waning of imperial power and influence within Britain and in the colonies. 4. A recent article in The Economist, argues that ‘much of [Britain’s] recent history – military, political and economic – can be seen as a kind of post-imperial malaise’. This spirit of thwarted endeavours is reflected in entangled efforts in Iraq, politicians’ yen to conjure a sense of Britishness to replace the defunct imperial version and the legacy of imperial trade and investment in the wake of the 2008/2009 financial crisis (The Economist, 2009, 39). 5. See Su’s Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (Su, 2005, 63–79). See also Baucom’s chapter, ‘Among the Ruins: Topographies of Postimperial Melancholy’, in Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Baucom, 1999, 164–9). 6. For the use of the phrase ‘nostalgic essentialism’ as part of Thatcher’s political strategies, see Su (2005, 129). 215 216 Notes 7. See John Higgins on Raymond Williams’s theory of cultural materialism. Higgins argues that ‘[t]he task of cultural materialism was to attend to that constitutive role of signification within cultural process, and so to seek to integrate the three usually separated dimensions of textual, theoretical and historical analysis’ (Higgins, 1999, 135). Writing on Williams, Anthony Giddens argues that cultural materialism, ‘regards culture as a “signifying system”, but not in the abstract way that is characteristic of structuralist thought; for Williams emphasises strongly the need to analyze the ways in which signifying practices are constituted institutionally and reproduced over time’ (Giddens, 1981, 215–16). 8. There is now a fairly well-established body of work in postcolonial studies around the relationship between postcolonial literature and ecocriticism. For the Indian context, see for example, Pablo Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English (2010) as well as Graham Huggan’s and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism (2009). 9. Here, I am thinking of NgǊgƭ’s Petals of Blood (1977), Soyinka’s novel Season of Anomy (1973) and his play From Zia with Love (1992) as well as Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1985). 10. See the focus on South Asian writers in Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace (Brouillette, 2007). 11. In non-literary practices of cosmopolitanism, the theory encompasses a way of living and being, and includes the more conventional understanding of a cosmopolitan as a citizen of the world. It has tended, in its popular conception, to exclude those who do not have access to the benefits of class privileges afforded by capital. Theorists of cosmopolitanism in the last decade have, however, been increasingly keen to expand this category of cosmopolitanism to include precisely the people who lack such access, and to furthermore reflect both the specific geographical locations and transnational histories that construct their lives. In this sense, it has been used as a mode of describing a limited form of agency for the subaltern, the refugee, the asylum seeker, and to a lesser extent, the disenfranchised immigrant. As a theory, cosmopolitanism continues to hold considerable appeal in postcolonial criticism as avenues for agency against the neocolonial state or neocolonial globalisation. For non-literary uses of the term, see for example, Paul Gilroy’s concept of ‘cosmopolitan democracy’ in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (Gilroy, 2004, 19); or in political theory, see the use of ‘cosmopolitan justice’ in Kok-Chor Tan’s Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism (Tan, 2004); for a wide-ranging study of sociological and anthropological uses of the term, see Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Vertovec and Cohen, 2002); in relation to cultural geography, see Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (Harvey, 2009). For more recent philosophical discussions of the terms, see Stan Van Hooft, Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics (Hooft, 2009). One of the earliest proponents of this form of cosmopolitanism was James Clifford. In his influential essay ‘Traveling Cultures’, he attempts to dissociate cosmopolitanism from the mobility of the privileged. These cosmopolitan movements, he argued, are presented as exemplary instances of active resistance to localism and cultural homogeni- sation under global capitalism. See Clifford’s argument for a ‘cosmopolitan, Notes 217 radical, political culture’ in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Clifford, 1997, 34). 12. See Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabartys’ ‘Introduction’ to a special issue in Public Culture on ‘Cosmopolitanisms’. In this article, the authors also go as far as to suggest that cosmopolitans today are ‘victims of modernity, failed by capitalism’s upward mobility, and bereft of those comforts and customs of national belonging’ (Pollock et al., 2000, 577). See also Homi Bhabha’s essay ‘Unsatisfied Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’ (Bhabha, 1996, 191–207) and Pnina Werbner’s article ‘Vernacular Cosmopolitanism’ (Werbner, 2006, 496–8). 13. See also recent special issue of ARIEL co-edited by Emily Johansen and Soo Yeon Kim on ‘The Cosmopolitan Novel’ (Johansen and Kim, 2011). Chapter 1 1. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, (New York: New Directions Books, 1998). All future references are to this edition. Sebald published four books in English before his death: The Emigrants (1996), The Rings of Saturn (1998), Vertigo (1999) and Austerlitz (2001). 2. On the relationship between melancholy and history in Sebald’s work, see Scurry (2010) and Barzilai (2007); See also Mark McCulloh’s chapter ‘Blending Fact, Fiction, Allusion, and Recall: Sebald’s “Literary Monism” ’ in McCulloh (2003, 1–26). 3. The issue of quite how to categorise Sebald has become one of critical atten- tion. Simon Cooke calls the book ‘contemporary travel writing’ (Cooke, 2009). Richard T. Gray believes that the book bears a ‘superficial adherence to the generic category of the travelogue’ (Gray, 2009, 27). The dual category of ‘fiction-literature’ is used by Sebald’s publisher, James Atlas (Atlas, 1999, 278). Susan Sontag, for example, argues that the work’s use of a variety of literary devices produce ‘the effect of the real’, while underscoring the text’s non- fiction elements (Sontag, 2002, 42). Rob Nixon calls Sebald a ‘laureate of the real’ in his article on the rise of non-fiction (Nixon, 2010, np). Gareth Howell- Jones calls the book ‘non-fiction’ in his review of The Rings of Saturn and clearly identifies the narrator as Sebald himself (Howell-Jones, 1998, 34). 4. In a 1993 interview with Sigrid Löffler, Sebald says: ‘I work according to the system of bricolage – as it was understood by Levi Struass. It’s a form of savage work, of pre-rationalist thinking, where one mucks around long enough among random findings until it all comes together somehow’ (Löffler, 1997). 5. Raymond Williams points out in The Country and the City that manor homes were based on a ‘network of income from property and speculation [that] was not only industrial but imperial’ (Williams, 1973, 282). 6. Sir Morton developed his railway firm through sheer perseverance and hard work, and very soon he became a leading building contractor, the largest employer of labour in the world and the constructor of large sections of the railways, not only in Britain, but in Denmark, Canada, Argentina and Russia. He won many notable contracts, including those for the Houses of Parliament in London and Nelson’s Column. Peto bought Somerleyton in 1843, but sold it in 1863 when he went bankrupt. 218 Notes 7. On the importance of the number 5 in the book, see (Theisen, 2006). 8. For an excellent account of the horrors of King Leopold’s regime in the Congo, see Adam Hochschild’s international best seller, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) in which the valiant but ultimately ill-fated life of Roger Casement is documented in greater detail than in The Rings of Saturn.

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