Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (review)

The title of Julie Codell's edited collection situates it clearly in the space opened up by post-colonial studies, a space in which absolute oppositions of imperial centre and colonial subject are destabilised, if not undone. Influenced by theorists like Edward Said and Homi Bhaba, who supply the epigraphs to Codell's 'Introduction', post-colonial studies explore the complex and shifting relationships in which imperial identities were worked out. My understanding of the project of 'Co-Histories' is that it involves thinking the narratives of metropolis and colony together and addressing the possibility of hybrid identities. Julie Codell, Professor of Art History at Arizona State University, has given us a volume which makes an important addition to this growing body of scholarship.

Those whose focus of research is periodical literature have long argued that the dialogic nature of serial forms gives them a particular importance in cultural history. However, in post-colonial studies, as in other more established humanities areas, periodicals are still often treated reductively. This volume is therefore particularly welcome because it brings work in periodical literature to bear on the project of post-colonial studies, focusing on national identities in the nineteenth-century British Empire. Codell's introduction gives an excellent account of the project of the book in these terms. Inevitably, the eleven individual essays vary in how far they employ the same theoretical model, but the collection works well as a whole. This is remarkable, given the range of disciplinary backgrounds from which contributors come. These include Anthropology, Art History, English, and History, Media and Communications Studies and Women's Studies. The diversity of approaches marshalled within a broad framework is one of the strengths of this collection as its address to visual as well as print texts.

The importance of India in the narratives of the British Empire is evident here, and six chapters deal either directly or indirectly with India. However, the range of material in the volume is much wider. Several of the articles deal with the way information was managed and transmitted across the Empire, whether by the telegraphic agencies which Alex Nalbach discusses; through the Imperial Press Conference, the subject of J. Lee Thompson's article, or through The Imperial Gazetteer, which Michael Hancher discusses. The volume as a whole relates the general argument to specific colonial histories though essays which relate to South Africa (Dorothy Helly and Helen Callaway), China (Catherine Pagani), and Australia (Toney Hughes-D'Aeth). It also brings into question the idea of Britain as a single nation through Aled Jones's subtle essay on the relationship between Welsh missionaries and India. Read as a whole, therefore, the volume posits a complex web of identities and knowledges, constructed, transmitted and resisted through a press which both stretched across the Empire and had local and particular manifestations.

Imperial Co-Histories is divided into two sections: the first is headed 'Sites of Authority; Imperial Domination and Press Intervention' and the second, 'Sites of Fracture; Resistance and Autonomy in Imperial Representation'. This looks as if it reproduces the old oppositions of ruler and ruled, but it manages to escape that. Several of the essays in the first section resist a too simple model of the 'domination' implicit in the sub-heading and instead develop arguments about the way the press worked to produce complex knowledges and hybridised identities. Notable here is Deepali Dewan's account of the way The Journal of Indian Art and Industry produced an imperial account of Indian art production. However, for me, the second section of this collection is particularly strong. Articles by Catherine Pagani on images of China; Denise Quirk's excellent essay on the 'True Englishwomen' and the 'Anglo- Indian' in the Women's Press; Codell's own thoughtful exploration of the way 'Native Informants' participated in the debate about India in the British press; Tony Hughes...