Life Writing After Empire

For centuries, the imperial expansion of Europe affected not only global power structures, but also individual subject positions of colonisers and colonised alike. With the changed world order of decolonisation came significant shifts in cultural assumptions and individual identities. Just as many new nations embarked upon rewriting their collective national histories, so too did individuals. The upheavals of decolonisation challenged people to make sense of their past from the perspective of the present, sometimes struggling to impose coherence upon disparate experiences and identities. While the end of empire has often been studied at the level of politics, economics and cultural movements, we have perhaps neglected to consider how individuals have responded to and navigated within a changing world order. Life writing provides us with a lens through which to consider the end of empire anew and in the process learn more about what life writing is and does in a post-imperial world.

This special issue is the result of a workshop in May 2015 at the University of Copenhagen. The ambition of the workshop was to bring together people from both history and literary studies to discuss our common interest in the manifold expressions of life writing after empire. While postcolonial studies has developed a critical apparatus for the engagement with literature from the imperial and post-imperial era, the field has occasionally been accused of being too detached from the actual historical context which has produced the texts (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2; Boehmer Colonial 6–7; Gikandi 182–3; Moore-Gilbert, Stanton and Maley 58–9). Historians working on the end of the British Empire have, for their part, traditionally drawn on public records and the archives of politicians, leaving literature to the literary critics. But in recent years, historians and literary scholars working on the end of empire have increasingly recognised the usefulness of their respective fields. As this special issue sets out to demonstrate, life writing may be a productive venue for the meeting of historical and literary approaches to the end of empire. The fact that life writing is at once aesthetic and referential makes it an interesting entry point for examinations of the cultural effects and articulations of historical change.

Breaking down the title into its constituent parts will show some of the themes and approaches that reappear in the essays. To begin with the genre ‘life writing’, the workshop aimed to include a diversity of text types as well as different disciplines and methodological approaches. Life writing comprises many sources for understanding the relationship between individuals and collectives at the end of empire. Thus, the essays draw on biography and autobiography, travel writing and memoir, letter, blog, diary and oral history as well as texts that challenge the limits of genre like the autobiographical novel, poetry and photography. Several of the contributors demonstrate the synergies that arise when reading different kinds of life writing by the same author together or when similar texts from different contexts are compared. This multitude of sources adds to our understanding of how the end of empire has been interpreted and articulated by individuals.

To examine ‘life writing’ is also to consider how these different texts might be approached. The study of life writing has often been carried out in the separate spheres of literature and history. The aim of this workshop was to bring people from both disciplines with a special interest in empire and its legacies into the same room for a conversation about our approaches to life writing and to encourage cross-fertilisation of the fields. The result is truly interdisciplinary: Javed Majeed reads a text normally studied by historians and political scientists, the Indian Constitution, alongside anti-colonial life-writing to see what new insights we might gain from reconsidering the Constitution in a different textual landscape. By reading the Constitution as an aesthetic work, Majeed is able to draw out its peculiar tone and texture and show its dialogue with other texts and how it, like anti-colonial life writing, dramatizes self-rule. Mark McKenna draws on his experience as the biographer of Australian historian Manning Clark to trace the autobiographical vein that runs throughout Clark’s works, irrespective of whether they were labelled ‘history’ or ‘autobiography’. Clark saw himself as the great chronicler of Australia’s past at the moment when the country was casting about for a new identity, and McKenna shows how he tended to conflate his own life with that of the nation. The mix of disciplines within and across the essays makes this volume of interest to scholars of life writing and postcolonial literature as well as (post-)imperial history.

Just as feminist scholars have revolutionised the field of life writing studies, so too, in recent years, have postcolonial critics expanded and challenged the way we think about life writing. Alongside the important works of scholars like Elleke Boehmer, Bart Moore-Gilbert and David Huddart, several of the writers from this volume have contributed to that movement, notably Philip Holden, Javed Majeed and Gillian Whitlock (Boehmer Stories; Holden; Huddart; Majeed; Moore-Gilbert; Whitlock Intimate; Whitlock Postcolonial). Like the interventions from feminism and other fields like disability studies, postcolonial critics have not only broadened the field of relevant texts but have also asked us to take a step back and consider the assumptions we bring to the texts and the tools we use to understand them. This special issue seeks to add to that development, and several of the contributors suggest new methods that challenge our conventional way of reading life narrative. Thus, Philip Holden argues that the prominence of biographies in the narration of Singapore’s decolonisation history has meant a binary understanding of the past and proposes instead that we study poetry and images as a way to overcome the constrictions of narrative. Vera Alexander suggests that the concept of relationality, which has become so central in life writing studies, ought perhaps to be applied to non-human relations too, like places and books. In this expansion of the relational, she demonstrates how the diasporic subject of M. G. Vassanji’s travel self-narrative is constituted through an emotional and imaginary attachment to India and how he manages that attachment through recourse to his literary forebears.

To turn to the ‘after empire’ part of the title, this invokes questions of when and where. The ‘after’ may signal both the time the texts were written and our postcolonial reading perspective. It can be a chronological marker or signal interest in the decolonising moment, but it can also describe our own position and how the questions we ask of texts are formed by postcolonial concerns or it can describe the perspective of the writers we study. The ‘after empire’ can signify the moment in which the object of study was produced or the moment in which we take up the study; it may refer to the empirical material or to the methodology. We may consider the very consequences of this ‘afterness’, how the end of empire affects or is portrayed in life writing. The postcolonial innovations referred to above reflect such a recalibration of approaches to texts, whether they are written before or after formal decolonisation. But the historical study of decolonisation has also undergone substantial changes, with the old settler colonies now also studied under that rubric, and with a greater attention to cultural production and the relationship between political change and popular attitudes (Hopkins; Howe; Ward).

When trying to fix the date of the end of the British Empire, we enter inherently nebulous terrain. Some point to India’s independence in 1947 as the turning point, while others trace the dissolution of the Empire back in time, seeing the Second World War as an emblem of decolonisation or invoking the Treaty of Versailles and the so-called ‘Wilsonian moment’ as seminal (Boyce; Darwin; Manela). Most historians, however, have reached a consensus that the process we now refer to as ‘decolonisation’ concerns a ‘twenty year crisis’ following 1945, at the end of which the global map had been fundamentally reshaped (Shipway). In addition to this difficulty of periodisation, a common objection is that the effects of colonialism continue to manifest themselves to such an extent that we cannot yet speak of decolonisation in the past tense. In spite of these challenges, this volume maintains that ‘life writing after empire’ can fruitfully function as a rubric of study, to demonstrate both the diversity of that field and the commonalities that occur across the board. Thus, the exact date of the end of empire is less important than the sense that there is an ‘after empire’ in which one has to navigate, an afterness which affects texts and scholars alike.

While Holden, McKenna and Majeed focus on the time immediately after the break with Britain, other authors demonstrate that decolonisation was not a one-off process of the second half of the twentieth century. Using life writing in a broad sense as an entry point, Charles Lock reminds us of those places and moments which tend to escape analysis as postcolonial. He traces life writing after empire all the way back to the American Revolution to include Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography. This early instance of decolonisation is, like the later case of Ireland, not often considered within the purview of the end of empire, but examining them may draw out interesting parallels to later iterations of postcolonial life writing.

Jennifer Ballantine Perera takes us up to the present day to alert us to a context which is not necessarily to be thought of as ‘after empire’, even in 2016. She discusses the ambiguous position of Gibraltar as a colony in a decolonised world and considers how individual life stories negotiate within a field of hegemonic narratives about the relationship to Britain and Spain. This relates to a concern of other essays, namely how the colonial past is told in a postcolonial present. My own contribution considers how individuals position themselves in a postcolonial age and how the changes to dominant narratives brought about by decolonisation affect the way they narrate their personal past. And Stephen Howe shows how the practice of imperial history seems to lend itself to autobiographical reflection, in ways that mirror and underscore the myriad ideological legacies of the imperial past.

The British Empire, famously colouring a quarter of the world red, can hardly be contained within a single volume. However, the contributions here do take us to most corners of the globe: to India, Ireland, Kenya, Singapore, the Caribbean, Australia, Nigeria, Gibraltar, Britain, South Africa and the US. Many of the essays reflect the necessity of a transnational lens if we are to make sense of the border-crossing trajectories of individual lives, imperial influences and post-imperial narratives. Some study people whose lives were transnational: M. G. Vassanji of Alexander’s essay is a Kenyan of Indian background now settled in Canada and writes a travel memoir of his journey to an India he has never seen before, describing the mixed experience of familiarity and strangeness of that encounter. And Gillian Whitlock follows Bart Moore-Gilbert’s memories of his African childhood as well as his journey from Britain to India to learn more about his father. Others, like Lock and myself, compare texts from dispersed contexts to study interesting commonalities as well as important differences. And some concentrate on one national context but show how that must be read in relation to the world around it, like Ballantine Perera’s reflections on Gibraltar’s complex relationships to both Britain and to Spain, or Majeed’s interpretation of India’s Constitution as a text engaged in a cosmopolitan dialogue with other constitutions around the world. Furthermore, Lock and Alexander both demonstrate the importance of places and spaces as more than a mere background for the text. Instead they argue for the constitutive role of place in the formation of individual subjectivity as well as in the production and reception of a piece of life writing. While the essays in this volume all discuss areas of the former British Empire, we hope that students of other post-imperial contexts will find the approaches and insights useful.

Reading these contributions together, we learn about the entanglement of the collective and the individual in life writing after empire: we see people who cast themselves as embodying the nation (McKenna), people whose personal reflections about the new nation feed into that country’s founding text (Majeed) and people whose lives are used to tell the national story in terms of friends and foes (Holden). There are people for whom a return to an ancestral country is a personal journey of inward discovery (Alexander) and people whose life narratives negotiate places of writing and places of reception (Lock). There are those for whom the personal memories of empire are disturbing as well as nostalgic (Whitlock) and those whose memories jar with prevailing narratives and who doubt the value of their own experience (Ballantine Perera). And we have people who use their memories to position themselves in a postcolonial society (Rasch) or to take stock of the development of the academic field of imperial history (Howe). All of these essays demonstrate the interaction between societal changes and individual experience and expression. This indicates that studying life writing after empire can give scholars of life narratives a better grasp of the formative context of writing and give students of the end of empire access to a more intimate level of analysis of historical phenomena.

One cannot examine life writing after empire without considering the tremendous contribution to that field by Bart Moore-Gilbert. He was scheduled to participate in the workshop that resulted in this special issue, where he would present on the experience of being at once a critic of postcolonial life writing and a writer of an end of empire memoir. Tragically, Moore-Gilbert was forced to cancel his participation by the cancer that would end his life too early in December 2015. In her afterword to this special issue, Gillian Whitlock pays tribute to Bart Moore-Gilbert and his work by considering precisely his memoir and his critical engagement with life writing after empire. Reading his memoir alongside his Postcolonial Life-Writing and his blog ‘oftherightkidney’, she studies The Setting Sun in the tradition of the patriography and considers how that genre negotiates painful memories at the end of empire.

I would like to thank the funding agencies that made this workshop and the subsequent publication possible, the Velux Foundation and the Centre for European Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Also, a word of gratitude to Stuart Ward for his invaluable help in organising the workshop as well as his generous advice on all stages of the process and to Maureen Perkins for her continued assistance and patience and her enthusiasm about the issue. Finally, of course, my heartfelt thanks to all the contributors to this special issue who have taken seriously the challenge of thinking about life writing after empire and provided their individual and original takes on the theme.