Significant Evidences and the Imperial Archive: Response

In postcolonial criticism the question of what counts as a significant exception sometimes comes to the fore. Often the imperial discourses of the metropolitan center seem so powerful and ubiquitous that they do not appear to brook exception. Edward Said announces in Culture and Imperialism: "Without significant exception the universalizing discourses of modern Europe assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world" (50). Revising the rhetoric about exceptions somewhat, he goes on to write "there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonized people should be heard from, their ideas known" (51). Said makes analogous generalizations about working-class imperial ideology in Britain: "With few exceptions, the women's as well as the working-class movement was pro-empire" (53). There is a tendency to acknowledge possible exceptions to hegemonic metropolitan discourse, only to discount those exceptions as infrequent or nonsignificant. I was thinking about methodologies like this at the NAVSA Conference while listening to the papers in the session on "Empire at Home—Contexts and Limits" and especially to Bernard Porter's paper entitled "'Empire, What Empire?' Or, Why 80% of Early-and Mid-Victorians Were Deliberately Kept in Ignorance of It." Porter writes in rejoinder to the cultural imperialist arguments of Said and others, contending that the British Empire before the 1880s "did not need the involvement in any way of the working classes, even to cheer it on" (257-58). Porter reports a lack of support for and ignorance of empire among the working classes that is "almost overwhelming" (258). Jeffrey Cox makes an analogous cautionary point in his essay "Were Victorian Nonconformists the Worst Imperialists of All?": "It is important to keep in mind, however, there are limits to the importance of imperialism in Victorian England, that imperialism was not everywhere in Victorian England." Cox notes that "defining those limits poses serious difficulties of definition and classification" (247). In responding to their papers, I will revisit some of those difficulties and limits. The boundaries or exceptions in which notions of straightforward hegemonic imperialisms do not apply might be places in which something else manages to emerge, both in Britain and around the rest of the globe.

The informing premises in post-something (postcolonial, posthuman, postmodern, poststructuralist, and so forth) literary and cultural methodologies tend to assume that at some recent time we commenced upon a corrective reading project that was not possible or not practiced previously. Said calls his version of this corrective approach contrapuntal: "As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to read it not univocally but contrapuntally. . . ." In this mode, we are simultaneously aware of the metropolitan histories and "those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts" (51). But we should remark: resonances and effects from those other non-European histories have long been insinuating their way into the archive. The claim of univocality, made most influentially by Said, needs to be rejected: the archive was already contrapuntal during—and well before—the Victorian period. We do not need the critical fiction that the archive formerly was, or was read as, univocal and single voiced. The persistence of contrapuntal materials, some of them derived from non-Western European resources, can be seen especially well if we shift our archival attention down to the micro-levels of traveling words and things.

From this point of view, we would do well to revive a few of the uniformitarian research principles shared by such nineteenth-century figures as John F. W. Herschel and Charles Darwin and by such lexicography projects as the Oxford English Dictionary.¹ Under those premises, we the investigators—as well as the various things, words, texts, organisms, practices, and phenomena under investigation—operate within a continuum or series. Traveling instances cross the continuum, from past to present, and from the so-called metropolitan center out to the so-called periphery and back. They can show up with different intensities, valences, effects, and meanings at...