Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies Ashley Dawson MacPhee, Graham . 2011. Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. $100.00 hc. $32.00 sc. xviii + 180pp. Iremember meeting veteran radical intellectual and activist Stanley Aronowitz on the street during one of the massive anti-war marches that preceded the invasion of Iraq. Introduced by a friend as a colleague at the City University of New York, Aronowitz asked about my area of specialization. When I replied that I worked on postcolonial studies, Aronowitz barked back, "What's that? Aren't we in the middle of an imperial onslaught?" I mumbled something about how I hadn't chosen this disciplinary designation, before Aronowitz was diverted by a group of women sporting large missiles between their legs. My uncomfortable exchange raises a variety of issues germane to Graham MacPhee's recent Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Aside from sticky disciplinary questions, the appellation 'postcolonial' denotes a particular temporal trajectory that, as scholars such as Anne McClintock have noted, hardly characterizes most nations in the global South accurately, given the fresh waves of economic and military control to which such states have been subjected since winning independence. The falseness of this designation is equally true of a former imperial metropole such as Great Britain, which, although it has 'lost' almost all of its colonies, continues to play an important role in the global economy through the good offices of the City-based financial industry, and which, as a member of coalitions such as NATO, also continues to project military force around the globe. How then are we to theorize literary production in a nation such as Britain, which repeatedly seems to fall into the grip of imperial nostalgia, and yet whose embassies in countries like Iran and Afghanistan continue to be assaulted by angry demonstrations against imperialism? This is precisely the complex terrain that MacPhee's book surveys. Central to MacPhee's intervention is his reconciliation of two important, apparently contradictory scholarly analyses of postwar British literary production. In the case of Jed Esty, author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2003), Britain's withdrawal from empire following the Second World War brought with it a celebration of narrowly defined [End Page 162] English national culture—the sort of thing celebrated by T.S. Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), when he discussed English national character as constituted by enthusiasm for everything from "Derby Day and Henley Regatta" to "the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, and Wensleydale cheese" (quoted in MacPhee 2011, 85). By contrast, John Marx's The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (2005) argues that, as decolonization took place and the UK lost its dominant international position, British culture was integrated into a new global system centered on the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States. MacPhee's book finds a way to integrate these apparently paradoxical positions by arguing that Cold War discourse relied on both a "new doctrine of strategic defense" that depended on "a spatially discrete nation as the homeland in relation to which strategic resources or territories would be mapped," and an "abstract freedom" that "enjoys an unbounded and delocalized scope" (26). In other words, territorializing and deterritorializing logics overlapped with one another during the Cold War, leading to literary production that emphasized both national retrenchment and participation in US global hegemony. MacPhee supports this subtle analysis of the integration of Britain into what Peter Gowan calls the US-centered hub-and-spokes system of the Cold War era with astute readings of a variety of texts, from Graham Greene's The Quiet American to essays and speeches by Winston Churchill, George Orwell, and T.S. Eliot. The latter section of this first part of MacPhee's book also demonstrates the political and cultural impact of the new dispensation: once integrated into the new postwar world order, Britain could represent itself as innocent of its imperial history, despite the fact that the era from 1945 to 1967 saw the UK conduct brutal colonial wars in places such as Cyprus, Kenya, and Aden (now Yemen). This reimagined community could...