Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire (review)

There are many stories that could be told about colonial British women writers, but the one we hear these days is that they were invariably agents of empire, either wilting victims, forced by fathers or husbands to leave behind the manicured greens of Tunbridge Wells, or villainous conquerors, heartlessly loading their Liberty chintzes onto tubercular "coolies." Seen as advancing their creative careers by appropriating native voices and experiences, they stand accused by contemporary critics of false consciousness at best, outright imperialist exploitation at worst.

It is impossible to believe this simplistic story after reading Phyllis Lassner's Colonial Strangers, which performs the much-needed work of "reality testing" narratives about the end of Empire that have consigned colonial British women writers to a single, predictable spot on our literary historical maps. Throwing down a critical-theoretical gauntlet before the scholars who make these maps, Lassner's revisionary postcolonial critique challenges what we think we know about relations between colonizing and colonized people, colonial and postcolonial eras. Relentlessly reading history into literature, she finds the stereotype of the memsahib writer unable to account for the complexities of late colonial women writers' literature, politics, and identities. This is in large part because many of these women were prepared to explore in their fictions and memoirs the costs of Britain's ideology of racial supremacy through their witnessing of the rise and fall of the twentieth century's most malignant imperial power, the Third Reich. The literary results of their urgent response to Hitler's quest for world dominance and the Nazi policies and practices of racial definition, enslavement, and extermination that supported it, form a crucial but until now unexplored bridge between colonial and postcolonial literatures, discourses, and theories.

Lassner leads us over this bridge, insisting on what should be obvious: that World War II should be included in our accounts of the end of Empire. Rather astonishingly, contemporary critics have failed to consider what difference Hitler's racial ideology of Aryan supremacy and ruthless drive towards world conquest had upon colonial and postcolonial literatures of the period. Lassner demonstrates that colonial writers like Olivia Manning and Phyllis Bottome recognize in their fiction what many scholars ignore in their criticism: that if Hitler had extended his imperial reign beyond Europe, all those constructed as "black" by the Nazis would have been subjected to a fate similar to that of Europe's "black" Jews. As Lassner puts it in her passionately argued introduction, "What we learn from the inclusion of the Jew and antisemitism in the writing of British women is that to exclude the Second World War from postcolonial analysis erases categories of race and racism that illuminate colonialism's savagery on any designated Other. Moreover, to exclude the Third Reich from colonial and postcolonial discourses is to forget and ignore that Hitler's racialist policies and practices represent the quintessential endgame of colonial oppression" (5).

To demonstrate how inclusion of the Third Reich and the Holocaust reshape our approach toward British colonial literature and postcolonial studies, Lassner focuses on novels, film adaptations, and memoirs that represent four regions of the aging British empire. Her densely argued, deeply researched chapters (the endnotes alone are worth a book review) are organized geographically, beginning with analysis of novels of the Middle East by Manning, Muriel Spark, and Ethel Mannin, moving next to texts about Anglo-India by Rumer Godden and about Kenya by Elspeth Huxley, then on to novels of the Caribbean by Phyllis Shand Allfrey and Bottome, until ending with a brief analysis of Zadie Smith's novel of postcolonial London, the exuberant and wildly popular White Teeth.

Without reducing the differences between her primary subjects' histories, politics, or literary forms, Lassner shows how in each case, the British colonial women she features interrogate the myth of British racial superiority and imperial destiny. Far from being imperial apologists fixed within one identity category, they grapple in complex and often...