‘A light to the world’: British devolution and colonial vision

Abstract

This essay explores the centrality of vision to colonial knowledge, and particularly the importance of a consolidated Britishness to this form of knowledge. It stresses that, in the case of anglophone imperialism, visual metaphors were created by those most keen to get involved in the empire – as in the assumptions of Edinburgh Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith and Hume. So far, those disciplines which have been concerned with Britain’s break-up, such as Scottish studies, and those disciplines which push for post-imperialist justice, such as postcolonial studies, have had surprisingly little to say to one another. This essay notes how vision in the Enlightenment sense requires a subject-self to be entirely separate from a knowable and unchanging object-world – exactly the epistemology of imperialism. Conversely, it also charts the breakdown of these metaphors in a post-Enlightenment scene in which Scottish thought shows extraordinary similarities to early postcolonialist thought, and as a case study compares Frantz Fanon’s and John Macmurray’s ideas of the subject-self. Moreover, it suggests that England, rather than Scotland, has become ‘invisible’ underneath British images of light leading from the Enlightenment, since England has occupied a default position which does the ‘seeing’. Thus the undoing (in the proper sense of the word, the deconstruction) of British vision, and the recovery of English specificity, may represent the final stage of anglophone imperialism, a situation in which the highly British subject-self will have ceased to have currency.