‘This Union-Jacked Time’: Memories of Education as Post-Imperial Positioning

ABSTRACT

The end of the British Empire saw profound changes to collective narratives of identity in former colonies—changes which did not leave individuals untouched. This essay examines how individuals use their autobiographical memories of education to position themselves within the new discursive and aesthetic frameworks of their postcolonial societies. Australian historian Russel Ward and Canada-based Barbadian novelist Austin Clarke both wrote their autobiographies in the 1980s and their texts reflect the after empire context in strikingly similar ways. As they recall their education, they link a curriculum focused on Britain to alienation from their local surroundings and associate their adoption of English speech patterns with snobbery. Clarke and Ward employ different positioning strategies in terms of their former selves, suggesting either their complete immersion in an imperial world view or their budding criticism of the curriculum. However, both authors signal to their postcolonial audiences that they now reject the politics of their schooling and by extension the imperial system which it is retrospectively made to represent.

KEYWORDS:

• Positioning
• education
• end of empire
• autobiography
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Astrid Rasch is a PhD fellow in English at the University of Copenhagen as part of the Velux-funded research project Embers of Empire. Her PhD project examines autobiographies from the Caribbean, Australia and Zimbabwe by people who have lived through the dissolution of the British Empire to study how they make sense of that event as well as of their lives during the colonial era. She has taught courses on contemporary Australia, on the metropolitan repercussions of the end of the British Empire and on Postcolonial Studies. She has published on the teaching of autobiographies and postcolonial studies. She holds an MA in English from the University of Copenhagen from 2012 and has spent terms at Monash University, Melbourne and the Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Oxford.