Modern Subjects/Colonial Texts: Hugh Clifford and the Discipline of English Literature in the Straits Settlements and Malaya, 1895-1907 (review)

Holden’s book explores “the beginnings of a particular kind of hybrid culture, one which came into being in the Straits Settlements and the various states of the Malay Peninsula under British influence in the nineteenth century” (3). He examines this culture through the work of Hugh Clifford, noting his dual significance: Clifford was one of the most popular authors of the time, and he also played a prominent role in the Colonial Service in the area. After considering (and dismissing) other theoretical frameworks for his examination, Holden develops his own. This is based on Foucault’s notion of “govern-mentality.” Through it, he determines that in Clifford’s work “concerns of government and textual authority are explicitly linked” (4). He also notes that both concerns relate to notions of sexuality and, finally, that all of these elements are aspects of the colonial culture shared by the British and the Malays.

Establishing a pattern that prevails in the remainder of the book, Holden’s second chapter examines the background for Clifford’s beliefs, uncovering their roots and exploring the ways that they are manifested in his work, primarily in the stories published while he was living in Malaya. He points out, however, that just as ambivalence is inherent in the colonial situation, it pervades Clifford’s work and is an important aspect of the author’s complicated ideas about masculinity and the complex romantic rewriting of his life.

Chapter 3 continues to focus on masculinity and highlights the link between it and race in the colonial context. After observing parallels between the Malayan “dandy” and the Victorian English “gentleman,” Holden demonstrates how Clifford’s belief in the ultimate superiority of the English male, which justifies British imperialism, is repeatedly reconstructed in Clifford’s autobiographically based fiction. Chapter 4 deals with women in the colonies and argues that the role of women in both Clifford’s life and his texts is to give men a function. They dictate the way men are to conduct themselves since British males must protect the “purity” of white women while at the same time controlling their own desires for alluring colonial subjects. Disease and a lack of self control are the topics in chapter 5, which shows the analogies between governing the self through personal health care and governing the colony though public health care. Particularly significant in this analysis is the focus on latah, which is a lack of control shown mainly by women, and amok, which is dominant in men of the colonized Malaya.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, Holden moves from a discussion of the influences on Clifford’work and how that work created a shared culture in colonial Malaya to a focus on “the reception and reinscription of Clifford’s writings by a community to which he was hostile, and which, in his own vision of colonial order . . . had no right to exist: the English-speaking Straits Chinese” (118). His concluding chapter briefly comments on the continued yet altered influence of the colonial Malaya and the Straits Settlements.

Since Clifford saw parallels between “the text, colony, and self” (133), and noted the links within them among masculinity, race, and class, Holden’s choice to examine all of them as influences on one another provides an interesting “imbrication” (Holden’s term throughout the book). His notice that Clifford’s ideas about all of these are marked by ambivalence at every turn only serves to make for a more multifaceted and complex reading of Clifford’s texts as they deal with the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, the economic implications of both colonialism and literary achievement, and the English struggle with homo-sociality.