Intersecting Nationalisms

BOOK REVIEWS Intersecting Nationalisms Elleke Boehmer. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920: Resistance in Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. viii + 239 pp. $65.00 IN HER INTRODUCTORY study Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Ania Loomba notes that the epithet "postcolonial" can now be attached to almost any object from home furnishings to novels, having acquired something of the range of "ethnic" in popular vocabulary. In this light, a book covering the years 1890-1920 which presents its subject matter as "postcolonial" might be the cause for some alarm. Elleke Boehmer's Empire , the National, and the Postcolonial is in fact a timely work, and indeed part of a growing and welcome movement towards historicization in postcolonial literary studies. Commencing as a challenge to categorizations such as "New Literatures in English" or "Commonwealth Literature " in the 1980s, postcolonial studies from its inception attempted to make connections across diverse geographical areas and between different literary genres. Much early postcolonial criticism, however, tended to impose its own binary logic: it either celebrated contemporary texts as emancipatory examples of postcolonial literatures in English, or deconstructed canonical European texts written under colonialism as representative of the prison house of colonial discourse. Boehmer's study, in parallel with recent publications such as Robert Young's Postcolonialism or Simon Gikandi's work on Jomo Kenyatta, attempts to engage with the complexity of resistance and nascent nationalism in the colonial world, and their expression in textual form. Her study thus elaborates an early phase of "cross-nationalist" connections between various actors who imagined—and indeed laid the foundations for—national communities, utilising an "interdiscursive" methodology that emphasizes both historical actions and their mediation through a variety of literary and non-literary texts. After a brisk and competent survey of relevant work in the field, Boehmer's introductory chapter concludes with a discussion of Irish nationalist opposition to enlistment in the Boer War, and the parallels drawn in the pages of the weekly review United Irishman between two very different anti-colonial struggles. The following two chapters of Empire , the National, and the Postcolonial illustrate connections between Bengali and Irish nationalism through a detailed exploration of the relationship between Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble) and Aurobindo Ghose. Chapter 4 then turns to Sol Plaatje, the South African writer and 345 ELT 46 : 3 2003 political activist, his engagement with thinkers as diverse as W E. Du Bois and Mohandas Gandhi, and his resultant production of "polyphonic " writing in both his novel, Mhudi (1930) and his nonfictional work Native Life in South Africa (1916). In a final chapter, Boehmer is more discursive, drawing together two discussions that address the relationship of modernism to anti-colonial nationalism. In the first of these, she explores the influence of Rabindranath Tagore on W. B. Yeats, while in the second she examines how the writing of Leonard Woolf on colonial Ceylon, especially his novel The Village in the Jungle, recognizes , albeit obliquely, "the claims of native self-representation" and produces a form of "symbolic decolonization." As this summary indicates, Boehmer makes no attempt at comprehensiveness —in the manner, for example, of Robert Young's recent volume —but rather proceeds with a series of case studies. This allows at times for considerable depth of analysis, but the paucity of the studies themselves, and the considerable variation in the detail in which they are presented, do tend to leave some of Boehmer's larger claims unproven . The weakest of the studies is also the longest—the discussion of the relationship between Nivedita and Aurobindo, which constitutes almost one half of the length of the book. Somewhat recursive in structure , Boehmer's account never quite pins down the nature or the significance of the "cross-cultural interaction" between her two political and social activists. She largely uses secondary sources, admitting that connections between the two are "difficult to trace, being either deliberately obscured or, very often, unreliably recorded." Her exploration raises many more questions than it answers. Boehmer rightly notes that Nivedita's relationship to Irish nationalism, as an English-identified Protestant, was tenuous, but the result of this revelation is to direct discussion away from "cross-nationalist" connections to the manner in which anti-colonial nationalism...