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  • Empire's Discontents:Burton in Retrospect
  • Susan Dabney Pennybacker (bio)

An anthropologist friend was a child immigrant from London's East End to New Zealand just after the Second World War, in an era when the numbers of those leaving the United Kingdom exceeded those arriving. He told me of his haunting memory of the monkeys kept in the working class households of some of western Europe's poorest residents—prizes of empire, tiny, spry animals who climbed on sofas and died quickly after the first delights at their arrival from the London docks. The itinerant prodigals kept trying to seize them as gifts, as expressions of the exoticism of maritime and military travels in the lower ranks and on the lower decks. We spoke of this at a time when it was rumored that the remains of a member of an endangered bird species were found in a garbage bin at a leading progressive U. S. liberal arts college—the detritus of an attempt by study abroad students to ship back a forbidden specimen from their academic sojourns. For my colleague, the monkeys served as proof of empire's deep inroads among his relatives and neighbors in a lost London childhood. For the study abroad students, the pillage of the bird was a form of predatory tourism, an engagement with the global that bespoke a sham cosmopolitanism, the capture of a bird for cash—redeemable on the market in illicit collectibles. The first story was told as a quiet, knowing response to my identifying myself as a modern British historian working on the former empire; the second was reported as a parable of young Americans abroad in the early new century.

The publication of Antoinette Burton's essays in this timely collection is a great boon to ongoing discussions of the imperial legacy and its iconography and historiography, as much as it is a contribution to debates about American higher education and its engagement with [End Page 291] the rest of the world. The dead monkeys offered evidence of the invasive nature of worldly experience in the humblest households of the old imperial capital, testimony to an eclipsed understanding of climate and survival. The dead bird told us that not all student global endeavors engender a new set of cultural sensitivities or allegiances to a human rights NGO. On both counts, as Burton's essays show, profound challenges remain: the challenge to historians' individual and collective capacity for increasingly multivalent international research, and the test of our abilities to convey knowledge to new generations of students often hell-bent on "globalizing" their educations and their prospective careers. Burton's retrospective collection provides much sustaining food for thought on both these fronts.

The republished essays include a foreword by Mrinalini Sinha and an afterword by C. A. Bayly, two very different historians whose reflections are of interest in their juxtaposition. Two especially useful new pieces by Burton lead and close the volume. The introduction offers an autobiographical account of the growth of her critical inquiry from its origins in childhood stints in England with her anglophile parents, to her observation of both racial and gender discrimination in the British and American academies while moving transatlantically, to the unfolding of the longest parts of her career in the United States. Though many in American British studies circles can recall the unpopularity and marginalizing of her earliest forays in debate and critique, so meticulously outlined and revisited in these essays, it bears mention that the absorption of Burton and many of her closest colleagues into prominent positions in the academic hierarchy, and their increasing voice in the formal organizations of British studies and in many other communal historical initiatives, are marks of influence and the gains of dogged combat—a success rate portended by the sound and fury of the essays in this volume.

British academic life has also undergone a series of transitions and open challenges in the Thatcher years and beyond, affording some recognition to Burton's British colleagues, both feminists and historians who study the impact of empire in the metropole and related areas of work. Burton's impact in both Anglo and American academic cultures, as well as...

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