Recombined Anticolonial Form at the Turn of the Century

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century conceived as a period in its own right is particularly meaningful to those of us who do empire studies since it is a pivotal one in British imperial history: the moment of Greater Britain, the Boer War, the conquest of Egypt, the Scramble for Africa, the First World War, and the Balfour Declaration. On the one hand, the empire was at its largest, most powerful, and most correspondingly bombastic; in 1881, John Seeley famously said "We seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind," and in 1899, Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" was published. But even though, by the end of the First World War, Britain controlled more territory than it ever had before, its global influence was more precarious than in the past—by 1922, nationalist movements were evident across the empire; Egypt, Ireland, and Afghanistan had gained independence; and Gandhi's trial and imprisonment for sedition testified to his immense and growing impact on Indian nationalism. Meanwhile, as Kipling's chummy encouragement on the eve of the Philippine-American war suggests, the American century was taking shape as simultaneously the friendliest and most formidable challenge to British imperial dominance.

The import of these historical events for British and world history provides sufficient rationale for a new periodization that bridges the Victorian and modernist eras to become one of the ways we might reconceive the discipline of English literature. Historians have used the temporality of the British Empire to demarcate periods for decades now (for example, Eric Hobsbawm's 1987 book, The Age of Empire 1875–1914) and literary studies should too. The correspondent changes in Anglophone literary culture that accompanied this momentous time in imperial history are equally compelling reasons to focus renewed attention on this period. The long turn of the century saw an explosion of print culture around the world, with technological innovations—such as steamship travel, railway networks, the telegraph, and the telephone—making it easier for news and newspapers to travel, while print and paper production technology made book and periodical publishing cheaper and quicker. The New Journalism, pioneered by W. T. Stead, gained influence in Britain and new print formats proliferated, such as the popular newspaper and the mass market paperback; the latter was often distributed at the new railway bookstalls that proliferated in Britain and around the empire during this period (Wheeler bookstalls, established in 1877, exist in India to this day).

These developments helped to create a transimperial Anglosphere that allowed English-language newspapers, books, periodicals, pamphlets, Bibles, and other printed matter to circulate within colonies, between colonies, and between colony and metropole in what Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr call a mobile "imperial commons." Because copyright had little purchase across borders, "print sprawled across distance, time, language, and script, carving out pathways of interest and influences, creating and recreating imperial events."¹ Gandhi's Indian Opinion could be found in South Africa, India, and Britain, for instance, and Stead's Review of Reviews appeared in Britain, India, Australia, and the US.²

While colonial texts circulated widely within this Anglosphere, they did not always circulate freely. Our ongoing collaboration on the phenomenon that we're calling colonial recombination grew out of our shared interest in the effect colonial governance had on literary and journalistic form. A range of texts across the empire used the citation and adaptation of well-known Anglo-American literary texts and genres as a form of critique: a phenomenon particularly prevalent at the turn of the century, when many anticolonial and nationalist movements were not yet overtly oppositional. These critiques were written often in response to, and as an effect of, the Anglicization imposed on colonial subjects and the sedition laws that were used to police their writing from the late nineteenth century onwards, encouraging writing that was circumspect rather than explicitly critical. As a result, recombinatory works have been consistently misread as derivative and anodyne rather than innovative and confrontational.

Our work on recombination emerges from projects that were originally pursued individually. Jason's book, Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017), examines the circulation of poetic genres in British colonial spaces (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa) and the political work in which those genres engaged to establish a sense of belonging for European colonialists.³ Tanya's book, Disaffected: Emotion, Sedition, and Colonial Law in the Anglosphere (2021), investigates the forms of critique practiced by Indians writing in English as they attempted to evade censorship once "disaffected" speech had been criminalized by the colonial government in the late nineteenth century.⁴ Through our conversations about our individual projects and their overlaps, we settled on "recombination" as the term that best captures the work of formal political resistance we see in literary works produced across the British Empire. Collaboration became a way to bring our different expertise within the period together so that we could take in this wide-scale phenomenon more effectively.

Recombination, or recombinatory, a term taken from genetics, describes "the rearrangement of genetic material … esp. the generation of a new combination of existing genes" and is useful for describing these kinds of texts because, like parody, recombinatory writing usually cites, or imitates, an original to which it refers, but creates a new content and rearranges the form so as to challenge the original.⁵ Unlike parody, with which it could be conflated, it does this to disidentify, rather than identify, with the premise of the original: far from being lovingly imitative, recombinatory form is fundamentally disaffected.

Understood this way, recombination is not adequately encompassed by pre-existing concepts in empire studies such as Homi Bhabha's colonial mimicry, which describes a splitting produced by colonial discourse. For Bhabha, mimicry is a strategy of "reform, regulation and discipline," but is also "a difference or recalcitrance … which … poses an imminent threat to … 'normalized' knowledges and disciplinary powers."⁶ But Bhabha's use of the term differs from what we mean by colonial recombination, which highlights the critical intention and formal innovations of a specific set of texts (as opposed to "discourse"). Another problem with the term mimicry is that it was used derogatively during the colonial period and after to dismiss the literary productions of colonized subjects.

Nor is recombination quite the same as parodic form. Margaret Rose's broad view of parody sees it as a mode encompassing not only mockery but also loving imitation of the original text.⁷ Carolyn Williams's work on Gilbert and Sullivan sheds further light on the critical work of parody by illuminating how it creates change: "In taking up its models, parody implicitly leaves them behind or rather … casts them back into the past, treating them as outmoded relics compared with itself," she argues.⁸ But recombinatory texts are not always comical or strictly imitative: most importantly, parody is not necessarily critical of the text it riffs on, unlike the recombinatory works that interest us.

The term "recombinatory" has been used outside nineteenth-century studies to describe processes similar to, or continuous with, those we observe in colonial texts. In Black studies, Saidiya Hartman and NourbeSe Philip use it to describe how their work deploys historical documents in fragmented form and in new combinations to address the lacunae in the slavery archive, while visual artist Stan Douglas uses it to name how some of his works engage with prior sources.⁹ As one critic has said of Douglas's work, his "recombinant pieces take the thematics and stylistics of a source and transform the original emphases, themes, formal characteristics in ways that invite the viewer to think of the intertextual relation dialectically."¹⁰ Looking at contemporary poetics across America, Rachel Galvin defines recombination as creative remixing that draws attention to material appropriation: "poems written under constraint and composed of recombined, appropriated text [can] thematize the activity of appropriation itself … subversive copying indicates the fissures in notions of property and subjectivity … poets appropriate literary capital through constrained recombination, recycling, and playful appropriations of language."¹¹

This kind of creative remixing under constraint, that appropriates creatively in order to historicize and critique material appropriation, is precisely what we want to be able to name and analyze in colonial texts at the turn-of-the-century moment on which this journal focuses. In our tracing of the phenomenon, recombinatory works tend to share three key characteristics:

1. 1. Publicness: the text tries to reach a large audience, taking advantage of imperial news circuits and occasions for performance. In other words, they need to travel well, as they are usually engaged in a critique of power structures with a wide reach, such as the British Empire, and they often seek to shame power by appealing to as wide an audience as possible. As Margaret Cohen puts it in her work on "Traveling Genres": "Genres that travel across space … must be able to address social and/or literary questions that are transportable, that can speak to … a public defined by its diversity, dispersion, and heterogeneity."¹²

2. 2. Citation, or reference to recognizable canonical materials. In this way recombinatory texts are usually characterized by formal simplicity; certain genres or modes are chosen because they can circulate easily in periodicals and be widely legible and recognizable across a range of geographical contexts. Their formal simplicity enables their citational practices to be more easily identified, and hence made more politically significant. The text's recombination—its citation of a commonly known text—must be legible on some level for the critique to work: the audience, too, participates in the work of recombination as it identifies and processes the text's citational practice.

3. 3. Double-coding: a term borrowed from postcolonial critic Kumkum Sangari that describes texts that speak to more than one audience at once: one recognized as "the public" and authorized as such, and the other a marginalized insider group.¹³ These texts speak back to their interlocutory text—both to its author and their audience—but they also create a new audience: the collectivity that is drawn together by the critical framing the text presents. If this framing is anti-racist, say, or anti-capitalist, the new audience created by the text may be an entity such as the "darker nations" or the international working class. Another implicit audience of this kind of text is the wider, unbounded one of what we might now call global public opinion—this audience includes those who might occupy the space of power rather than the subject-position of the recombinatory text but can nonetheless be swayed by its critique.

A good example of recombination at work that will be familiar to many readers is the multiple parodies of "The White Man's Burden" that appeared following Kipling's publication of it in McClure's Magazine in the US and in the London Times.¹⁴ Albert E. McKay, in a letter to the New York Times about the parodies published in 1899, the same year as Kipling's poem, states that he had found at least thirty of them:

It is curious to see how many poets have suddenly awakened to the fact that there are any others who have burdens as heavy and even heavier than the "white man's," and have straightway proceeded to voice their sentiments in appropriate messages to the world. So we have the "Black Man's," the "Red Man's," the "Brown Man's," the "Poor Man's," the "Rich Man's," the "Chinaman's," the "Toiler's," the "Christian's," the "Miner's," the "Dear Wife's Burden," and many others, including different views of "The White Man's Burden," earnest, sarcastic, comical, and so on.¹⁵

Many of these parodies are fascinating, but perhaps the most exemplary of what we mean by colonial recombination is Hubert Henry Harrison's "The Black Man's Burden" (one of many versions with that title). Harrison was a Caribbean American writer, speaker, labor organizer, and radical political activist who was engaged with socialist internationalism and the New Negro movement and who served as an editor for Marcus Garvey's The Negro World before breaking with him to advocate for Black separatism in the US (as opposed to Africa); as part of this effort, he founded the International Colored Unity League in 1924. "The Black Man's Burden" appeared as an epilogue to his book When Africa Awakes (1920), a political treatise that addressed racism in the US and around the world and sought to document and bolster "black, brown, and yellow" solidarity against what he called "white capitalist internationalism."¹⁶

Before it appeared in his book, however, Harrison's poem was first published in 1915 under the pseudonym "Gunga Din" and then as a leaflet published by the Liberty League—Harrison's "New Negro" organization—in 1918. It is in this format that the full impact of the parody comes through, as Harrison's poem appeared on the facing page to Kipling's, encouraging a line-by-line comparison that underscores how carefully and firmly Harrison overturns Kipling's assumptions and reverses them, making the white man rather than the colonial subject the object of contempt, the problem that needs a solution (see fig. 1). The leaflet format is also significant because it would have made the poem easy to distribute freely to Liberty League members while underscoring its import as a political tract.

For while many of the Kipling parodies are witty and critical of imperialist hypocrisy—particularly Henry Labouchère's 1899 version "The Brown Man's Burden," perhaps the best known of them—Harrison's is both these things and an ardent call to arms: one that drew upon his experience of Caribbean colonialism and of racism in America to imagine a radical, internationalist "darker nations" solidarity. Stanza 3 makes it clear that the exploited "Black Man" of the poem is a worker:

Take up the Black Man's burden—Reach out and hog the earthAnd leave your workers hungryIn the country of their birth

If blackness is connected to labor, it is also extended to racialized people of Asian descent. A quote on the cover of the leaflet, attributed to Abdurrahman Es Saadi, notes sardonically that the ideals of democracy do not "apply to the darker peoples of Africa and Asia. The white man insists upon his God-given right to rule these other men as he sees fit." Harrison seems to refer to this conjoined category of "darker peoples" in the fifth stanza, which reads:

Take up the Black Man's burden—And reap your old reward;The curse of those ye cozen,The hate of those ye barredFrom your Canadian citiesAnd your Australian ports;

Figure 1.

"The Black Man's Burden" broadside (1920), Hubert Harrison Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

And when they ask for meat and drinkGo girdle them with forts.

The reference to Canada and Australia invokes the anti-immigration policies that went into effect in both settler colonies in the early twentieth century. Canadian legislation between 1885 and 1911 was specifically designed to block first Asian immigration and then Black farmers trying to migrate from the US, while a "White Australia" policy guided immigration law in the antipodes from the 1890s onwards. In referring to these contexts while also invoking slavery in America ("bind our sons in shackles / To serve your selfish greed"), Harrison draws attention to the continuities and connections between American and British imperialism and racism and also between people of color around the world; it is significant that he satirizes one of Kipling's most objectionable lines simply by adding a couple of letters: "the silent, sullen people" becomes "these silent, sullen peoples" (our italics). The demonstrative pronoun he introduces suggests the specificity and proximity of the formidable masses conjured up by the word "peoples," while the plural also evokes the global solidarity he envisioned between "black, brown, and yellow" peoples, as well as exploited white workers.

But his most effective retort to the Anglo-American white supremacy that Kipling and others were promoting in this period is not just the anti-colonial, anti-racist internationalism that the poem conjures up but the quiet menace that permeates it, no doubt designed to remind Harrison's readers of his belief in Black armed self-defense in the face of white violence. The threatening tone of the poem is most evident at the poem's start and finish. In the first stanza, the shackled men must

… wait in heavy harnessBe-devilled and beguiledUntil the Fates remove youFrom a world you have defiled.

Building on this reference to the White Man's "removal," the last two stanzas are more menacing still, suggesting reprisal and punishment:

Take up the Black Man's burden—Until the tale is told.Until the balances of hateBear down the beam of gold.

And while ye wait rememberThat Justice, though delayedWill hold you as her debtorTill the Black Man's debt is paid.

While the references to "Fate" and an abstract "Justice" in these stanzas might conjure up for some readers divine retribution, a reckoning in the afterlife, Harrison was outspoken about his atheism and known by those who followed his work for reviling Black Christians and a "Jim Crow Jesus." The justice to come, then, can only be brought about by the "darker peoples" and workers whose exploitation the poem relentlessly traces and whose solidarity it hypostatizes—a dialectical reckoning that the poem depicts as both imminent and inevitable.

As Harrison's poem demonstrates, recombinatory form can use satire and parody but its hallmark is its critical mission—its dedication to undoing and remaking the object of its critique into a literary work targeted at a different audience and oriented towards a different future. Harrison achieves this not only through his words but also by deploying the democratizing leaflet format in which they appeared. Our gambit here—both in this short essay and in the larger project of which it is part—is to suggest that by paying attention to colonial recombination, we can see a huge body of archival material, such as the leaflet version of "The Black Man's Burden," not as incidental, derivative, or assimilationist, but as richly suggestive, formally innovative, and politically charged. Such an approach not only enlarges and enhances our archives but underscores the way a focus on a different temporality—the cusp of the century, the age of empire—also necessitates a different sense of space. To read Harrison's poem attentively, we must think transimperially and interimperially, bearing in mind the particular yet intermeshed histories of St. Croix (where he was from), the Philippines, Canada, Australia, Britain, America, and Africa.¹⁷ This in turn accentuates the importance, if not the necessity, of collaboration to our work and to the overlapping fields and disciplines addressed by Cusp; if one of our goals and objects of study is the critique of individualism, our methodology strives to embody it.