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  • RecombinedAnticolonial Form at the Turn of the Century
  • Tanya Agathocleous (bio) and Jason Rudy (bio)

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 [End Page 105] 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 [End Page 106] 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...

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