Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (review)

Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity, by Ian Baucom; pp. x + 249. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, $55.00, $18.95 paper.

Ian Baucom must already be heartily sick of explaining the relationship between his new book and Simon Gikandi's 1996 Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, but the question will arise. Almost exactly the same length and structure, these two "mapping" or "locating" books traverse the same historical territory--roughly from the Governor Eyre controversy to the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988)--disembarking at several of the same stations: Victorian sages on Morant Bay, Enoch Powell and racist Englishness, C. L. R. James on cricket, Rushdie versus Homi Bhabha. To be sure, there are differences. Gikandi's was not a successful book, cursory, incoherent, and ill-written; Baucom's is a generally fine one, though marred by some longeurs and stylistic infelicities all too characteristic of postcolonial studies. Where Gikandi focused on Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, Baucom attends to John Ruskin; he reads Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster rather than Gikandi's Anthony Trollope, Mary Seacole, and Mary Kingsley; V. S. Naipaul rather than Graham Greene. For Gikandi, "writing colonial identities used to be simple when the metropolis and the colony were defined by binary tropes, intelligible temporalities, and stable cartographies," but "[n]ow that the categories that authorized the colonial relationship have collapsed, the politics and poetics of cultural identity seem pretty messed up" (Gikandi 225). Baucom argues instead that "the loss of cultural certainty, the disorienting 'shock' that [. . .] readers of the postmodern have isolated as the defining characteristic of our time, is by no means something new," the entire imperial era being characterized by "serial collapses of authentic [English] identity" and the "dispersal" of England's "locations of identity" (220). Yet even their divergences in quality, material, and thesis cannot dispel the dispiriting feeling of sameness one gets from reading these books, an effect most likely attributable to the frenzied and overexposed process of disciplinary consolidation which postcolonial studies has undergone over the past decade or so. This school of thought incomparably devoted to difference has become a scholasticism of nearly identical assumptions, points of reference, and rhetoric, its "original insights" and "fresh perspectives" mere emendations on an all-too-agreed-upon map. Baucom confesses himself disturbed by the signs that postcolonial discourse "is rapidly becoming self-congratulatorily unanimous in its convictions" (188). But he lets us hear enough of his distinctive and intelligent voice to make us regret how willingly and often he suppresses it for the common postcolonial good.

Baucom contends that struggles to control the idea of Englishness over the past 150 years have largely been struggles over places endowed with the capacity to summon up feelings of "the nation's essential continuity over time" (4). This primacy of place is by no means absolute, for the category of place has intersected with and collided with others; but, basing his claim upon a useful survey of English nationality law (which remained based on the principle of birthplace instead of lineage until 1981), Baucom embarks upon a scrupulously careful and even-handed demonstration of some illustrative destabilizations and reformations (or even "redemptions") of "English" sites. The Introduction builds upon Arjun Appadurai's account of the wedge that imperialism can drive between affective and purely political or juridical ideas of national space. Expansion of the amount of territory under legal, political, and economic control ("the British Empire") has tended to be accompanied by a shrinking of the "territory of affect" ("England"), or by the supercession of place by other categories of belonging. In his chapters, Baucom performs a series of fine analyses of particular locales (for example, the Gothic railway terminus at Bombay) or kinds of locales (for example, cricket fields), though he does not fully exploit the possibilities Appadurai sets out. What is at stake here...