Colonial Locations of Contested Space and John Bull's Other Island

Colonial Locations of Contested Space and John Bull's Other Island

The grand narratives of nineteenth century historicism on which its claims to universalism were founded—evolutionism, utilitarianism, evangelism—were also, in another textual and territorial time/space, the technologies of colonial and imperial governance.

—Homi Bhabha, "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern"

There is a strain in the writings of Bernard Shaw between his attempt to supply "grand narratives" for his time, such as a religion of Creative Evolution or a political doctrine of socialism, and his critiques—or deconstruction, as we would now say—of Enlightenment reason and of nineteenth-century liberal ideals, particularly in the essays written in the 1890s from The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) to The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). ¹ We may note that his various attempts to provide some "grand narratives," the plays Man and Superman (1903) and Back to Methuselah (1921) and the political works The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism (1928) and Everybody's Political What's What? (1944), notably fail to provide the unifying coherence that the form demands. And perhaps that is how it should be: that failure is rather a realization, a recognition of the limitations or even impossibility of such coherence in spite of the seeming need for grand narratives—a human need for something to believe in.

Shaw's suggested grand narratives cannot be identified simply with such deconstruction exercises as that of messianic socialism in "The Illusions of Socialism" (1897), of traditional Christianity in relation to the Gospels in "On the Prospects of Christianity" (1914; the preface to Androcles and the Lion), or of late-nineteenth-century biological science in "The Infidel Half Century" (1921; the preface to Back to Methuselah). Neither can they be easily separated from such critiques: Shaw's proposed grand narratives rewrite history as a critique of previous historical rewritings. The play cycle Back to Methuselah, for example, proposes a critique of the theory of evolution that is also a rewriting of the cultural impact of Darwin's theory of natural selection on religious belief, for Darwin's theory was in large part a rewriting of areas of knowledge that had previously been the preserve of religious discourse. In "The Revolutionist's Handbook" appended to Man and Superman, Shaw's character John Tanner bases his call for the Superman to supplant Man by deconstructing what Michel Foucault might call the humanist's invention of man in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of its corollary, the nineteenth-century liberal belief in human progress. ² Shaw's religious views are predicated on the failures, as he sees it, of nineteenth-century science and the practices of Western religion; his politics are predicated on the shortcomings (especially that of systemic urban poverty) of a highly developed capital-based, unregulated industrial economy. A somewhat surprising third "grand narrative" to which Shaw at times subscribed was imperialism, with which this essay is concerned, but the difference between espousing and deconstructing the myth is barely distinguishable. ³ This, I hasten to add, is not a shortcoming on Shaw's part but a recognition of the complexities of articulating public discourse, complexities I will try to explore here.

In a preface to Peace Conference Hints, written for a French edition of his pamphlet in 1919, Shaw explains to his French readers: "[I]t is not necessary to explain that I am not a Frenchman. It is, however, necessary to explain that I am not an Englishman. The secret of my detachment from British chauvinism is that I am an Irishman." ⁴ Fifteen years earlier, W. B. Yeats had invited Shaw to contribute a play to the newly formed Irish National Theatre Society, which was about to open its new—and soon to be famous—theater in Dublin, the Abbey. On 17 June 1904, Shaw began writing his "patriotic contribution to the repertory of the Irish Literary Theatre," which he provisionally entitled...