Between Modernism and the Postcolonial: Reading Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry in the 1970s

Abstract

In Maps of Englishness Simon Gikandi recounts his time at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s, thinking about empire, writing and identity ‘before the advent of postcolonial theory and cultural studies’.1 In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a PhD student, also from a former colony, seeking intellectual capital abroad at the University of British Columbia. I also was working on the relations between the end of empire and the ‘crisis’ in English identity in a thesis on the fiction of Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry. But my ability to grasp those relations was thwarted not so much by the state of postcolonial or cultural theory as by the peculiar force of the late-settler nationalism I carried with me. As a ‘Pakeha’ (European-descended) New Zealander professionalising myself at a university in another settler nation I had yet fully to confront the awkward cultural politics of decolonisation. The country I had left behind was entering its own identity crisis both as the loyal offspring of a Britain with more pressing concerns than its former colonies and as a settler society beginning to feel its own internal discontents: in particular, an increasingly assertive sovereignty movement among Maori people. Nevertheless, the growing disenchantment among the Pakeha middle class with Prime Minister Rob Muldoon’s revivalist settler state had not yet shocked the underlying structure of settler consciousness into acknowledging its colonial history or the limits of its complacently monocultural nationalism.