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Research in African Literatures 31.2 (2000) 233-234



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Book Review

Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism


Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, by Simon Gikandi. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. 268 pp. ISBN 0-231-10568-3 (cloth), 0-231-10599-1 (paper).

The preface to Maps of Englishness recalls two questions that began to trouble the author as a graduate student in Edinburgh in the early 1980s: "Why did formerly colonized people, many of whom had spent generations fighting against colonial domination, seem to invest so much in cultural institutions [. . .] that were closely associated with imperial conquest and rule? And why was it that here in Great Britain [. . .] the nature and destiny of the country were being discussed in terms previously reserved for the former colonies [crisis of national identity, underdevelopment, creating usable pasts]?" (ix). Gikandi has arrived at answers that insist on the linkage of these issues. Most succinctly, he argues that "in terms of consciousness, ideology, and even language, the imperial experience invented a referent (empire) and a culture (that of colonialism) that became the conditions of possibility for metropolitan and colonial subjects and cultures alike" (191). Moreover, Gikandi insists that "colonialism is an incomplete project" (9). Among the formerly colonized, emulation of the values and institutions of modernity, especially those of bourgeois society, perpetuate colonialism's cultural categories outside the historical circumstances that produced them (32); in the metropolitan center, the unacknowledged role of colonialism in the construction of Englishness precipitates the crises of national identity and moral panics about race that have marked Britain's late twentieth-century history (xvi). In support of these central claims, Maps of Englishness engages in five wide-ranging and thoroughly researched studies of the culture of colonialism, from the 1865 debate between Carlyle and Mill on Governor Eyre's conduct in Morant Bay, Jamaica, to the dilemmas posed in and by The Satanic Verses. Indeed, one of the achievements of this study is its synthesis and extension of many contemporary arguments about colonial and postcolonial texts and cultural controversies.

Gikandi argues that metropole and colony be understood as antinomies connected through the figure of modernity (18). His book provides incisive textual and cultural analyses of the colonial constitution of England and Englishness, and of Britain's postimperial crises. By focusing on the "theatricality and affectiveness" of texts rather than their ideological goals (56-59), Gikandi traces a pattern of constituting modern Englishness in relationship to colonial space and difference. The book investigates questions of identity and culture for the colonized and formerly colonized with less thoroughness, however. This unevenness undercuts the central argument, as does the author's choice to discuss diasporic cultures and texts to the near exclusion of those produced from within postcolonies. [End Page 233]

Maps of Englishness also intervenes productively in ongoing controversy about the term postcolonial and the theoretical work it has spawned. Gikandi "use[s] the term postcolonialism as a code for the state of undecidability in which the culture of colonialism continues to resonate in what was supposed to be its negation" (14) and argues that "postcolonial theory is most useful in its self-reflexivity, especially its recognition that the colonized space was instrumental in the invention of Europe just as the idea of Europe was the condition for the possibility of the production of modern colonial and postcolonial society" (6). Gikandi anticipates a critique of his theoretical interests and textual focus. He insists, however, that texts were tools of rule as well as instruments for mediating colonial and domestic crises of identity (xviii-xix), and that postcolonial theory provides tools to question both nativism and colonial epistemology.

Maps of Englishness assumes rather than provides familiarity with a broad range of intellectual and social histories and with the debates and dense language of postcolonial theory. It also assumes the reader's patience with unnecessarily skewed readings of European modernism (e.g., suggesting that the crisis of belief in colonialism is the only force generating the moment of English modernism...

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