Baucom Out of Place

Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity
Core Textbook
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2303-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

In a 1968 speech on British immigration policy, Enoch Powell insisted that although a black man may be a British citizen, he can never be an Englishman. This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. Ian Baucom reveals how "Englishness" emerged against the institutions and experiences of the British Empire, rendering English culture subject to local determinations and global negotiations. In his view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity.

Analyzing imperial crisis zones--including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981--Baucom asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. To answer this question, he draws on a surprising range of sources: Victorian and imperial architectural theory, colonial tourist manuals, lexicographic treatises, domestic and imperial cricket culture, country house fetishism, and the writings of Ruskin, Kipling, Ford Maddox Ford, Forster, Rhys, C.L.R. James, Naipaul, and Rushdie--and representations of urban riot on television, in novels, and in parliamentary sessions. Emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some crucial locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition: the Morant Bay courthouse, Bombay's Gothic railway station, the battle grounds of the 1857 uprising in India, colonial cricket fields, and, last but not least, urban riot zones.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Baucom, Ian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Locating English Identity 3

Ch. 1 The House of Memory: John Ruskin and the Architecture of Englishness 41

Ch. 2 "British to the Backbone": On Imperial Subject-Fashioning 75

Ch. 3 The Path from War to Friendship: E.M. Forster's Mutiny Pilgrimage 101

Ch. 4 Put a Little English on It: C.L.R. James and England's Field of Play 135

Ch. 5 Among the Ruins: Topographies of Postimperial Melancholy 164

Ch. 6 The Riot of Englishness: Migrancy, Nomadism, and the Redemption of the Nation 190

Afterword: Something Rich and Strange 219

Notes 225

Index 245

Über Autor(innen)

Ian Baucom is the Dean of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.