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Fictions of a New Imperial Order: Wwii Nostalgia in Contemporary British Literature

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Fictions of a New Imperial Order: Wwii Nostalgia in Contemporary British Literature FICTIONS OF A NEW IMPERIAL ORDER: WWII NOSTALGIA IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LITERATURE by Rosa E. Barker A thesis submitted to the Department of English In conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2009) Copyright © Rosa E. Barker, 2009 Abstract In this dissertation, I focus on a number of British novels written since 1995 that engage with the events of the Second World War. I analyze the extent to which these literary representations of WWII enable and/or subvert the consolidation and justification of current imperialist ideology and practice, through the reproduction and/or deconstruction of WWII nostalgia. I argue that nostalgia for the “just war” depends upon the repression of the colonial past and, thus, I also explore evidence in this literature of the return of the repressed: colonialism haunts these narratives. However, alongside the racialism of colonialism, my readings of these texts expose traditional gender norms and capitalist triumphalism as the other major ideological currents that sustain both WWII nostalgia and contemporary forms of imperialism. The novels I deal with are from a range of literary categories, from those characterized as “low” or “middle-brow,” to those canonized within the pantheon of “high-brow” literature, as well as those characterized as “multicultural” or “postcolonial.” I examine the ways in which the literary “classes” or categories, within which these various texts are circumscribed, condition and frame their reception. Ultimately, I seek to to reveal the ways in which various accounts of the past, and specifically the Second World War, enable different understandings of the present. ! ""!! Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Chris Bongie, for his help and support. Professor Bongie has been an ideal supervisor. It is with his insight and guidance that I developed the original idea for this dissertation. His dedication as a supervisor has been evident in his extensive and always amazingly prompt feedback. His commentary on my work has consistently been both challenging and encouraging. The help he has given me and respect he has shown me in the process are marks of his quality as an excellent teacher. Thank you also to my second reader, Professor Glenn Wilmott, for his incisive and thought-provoking readings of my work. I would also like to acknowledge the help of my mother and step-father and the many hours they spent listening to me read various drafts of these chapters out-loud. Last, but not least, I want to thank my partner, Earl, whose ongoing support has enabled me to complete this final manuscript… just days before the birth of our twin daughters. ! """! ! Table of Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements............................................................................................................iii Table of Contents............................................................................................................... iv Chapter 1 Introduction I: Imperialism and Nostalgia ......................................................... 1 Chapter 2 Charlotte Gray: WWII Nostalgia in Popular Fiction....................................... 15 Chapter 3 Atonement: WWII Nostalgia in Elite Fiction ................................................... 43 Chapter 4 Introduction II: Marketing Multiculturalism.................................................... 82 Chapter 5 Small Island and the Making of Multicultural Britain ..................................... 99 Chapter 6 "Cool Britannia," White Teeth, and WWII..................................................... 133 Chapter 7 Conclusion: Resisting WWII Nostalgia in Amitav Ghosh's Glass Palace.... 169 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 200 ! "#! ! Chapter 1 Introduction I : Imperialism and Nostalgia I. WWII Nostalgia and the “New Imperialism” In an interview published in The Observer to mark the 60th anniversary of D-Day, Tristram Hunt prefaced his piece with the contention that his interviewee, Prime Minister Tony Blair, “appeared to relish our discussion on the meaning and legacy of D-Day and the Second World War.” Blair claimed that World War II represents the liberation of Europe from the evils of Nazism: “[F]ascism was defeated and peace in Europe began for the first time ever. It was a triumph over probably the most evil ideology that has ever been put forward in the world and it has ushered in an era of unprecedented stability and peace.” Reflecting on the spirit of national unity inspired by the fight against the Nazis, Blair stated: “Everyone then knew the nature of the threat, and the war was a tremendous coming together.”1 This representation of the war as a moment of national cohesion, where both enemy and ally were unambiguously defined, is central to contemporary constructions of British national identity. In Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) Paul Gilroy points to the contemporary obsession with recounting the Second World War. The anti-Nazi war, he argues, provides a foundation for Britain’s sense of identity, the rallying together of an entire population against the forces of totalitarianism. The “just war” has been constructed as a “mythic moment of national becoming” which retains a “special grip on Britain’s culture and self- understanding” (87). However, for Gilroy, in spite of the representation of Allied 1 Tristram Hunt, “Tony Blair in Conversation with Tristram Hunt: ‘D-Day’s Outcome was the Beginning of a New Europe’,” The Observer [London], 6 June 2004: F19. ! $!! governments as the forces of liberalism and tolerance waging just war against the “Ubermensch,” the glorification of the Second World War is, in fact, indicative of nostalgia for a mythic racial homogeneity. This nostalgia is symptomatic of a longing for “the recovery or preservation of endangered whiteness” (88), and for a clearly defined national identity that can act as a panacea for the contemporary anxiety produced by an insecure, postcolonial condition. WWII functions to “connect people to the fading core of a culture and a history that is confronting a loss of certainty about its own distinctive content and its noble world mission” (88). Images of the war against Hitler “provide a touchstone for the desirable forms of togetherness that are used continually to evaluate the chaotic, multicultural present and find it lacking” (88). The “memory of the country at war against foes who are simply, tidily and uncomplicatedly evil,” Gilroy notes, reinforces the idea that “we are still good while our uncivilized enemies are irredeemably evil” (88). This consolidation of British identity around the primary dualism of good versus evil – the allied victory “was a triumph over probably the most evil ideology that has ever been put forward in the world” - is inseparable from the binary logic that underpins racism and imperialism. As Gilroy points out, in her renaming of Nazism as “race imperialism,” Hannah Arendt suggested that the “characteristic brutality of European colonial rule was one of the most important ‘elements which crystallized into totalitarianism’” (15). By associating Britain with unimpeachable good and effacing the connections between colonialism and totalitarianism, British nostalgia for the “just war” can be seen as part of a larger proliferation of revisionist accounts of imperial and colonial history. ! %!! Undeniably, depictions of Britain’s righteous war against evil so prevalent within current popular and political discourse work to circumvent Britain’s responsibility for its own racial imperialism, itself not so far removed from that of its Nazi cousin if we are to believe anti-colonial thinkers like Albert Memmi, who argued in 1957 that colonialism is “one variety of fascism” (63); or, Aimé Césaire, who wrote, in Discourse on Colonialism (1955), that European peoples “have cultivated Nazism.” For, according to Césaire, “before it was inflicted on them,” European people “absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples” (174). Furthermore, numerous scholars have indicated that selective memories and mythic distortions of WWII have served to efface a series of other major atrocities for which the Allied governments were responsible: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, as well as the numerous bloody wars that have been waged since the defeat of the Nazis. As Noam Chomsky points out in Hegemony or Survival (2003), in “the war crimes trials after World War II… crimes qualified as crimes if they were carried out by the enemy, not the Allies” (20-21). Indeed, as American literary scholar Marianna Torgovnick points out in The War Complex: World War II in our Time (2005), “the first and major Nuremburg trial, the International Military Tribunal (IMT), carefully structured charges against defendants to avoid the possibility that using atomic bombs against civilians could be constructed as war crimes” (6). The construction of the holocaust as an unprecedented and exceptional event spearheaded by a deranged and power-hungry lunatic disavows the extent to which WWII was a consequence of intra-European capitalist conflicts initiated during the First ! &!! World War, as well as of the
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