The Uses of (An)other History: A digression from Linda Colley’s Britishness and Otherness: An Argument

Abstract

The question that animates this paper is deceptively simple: what is brought into ‘play’ in the conjunction of the signifiers ‘Britishness’ and ‘Otherness’? Is the coupling of these two terms merely a taxonomic convenience, a way of marking out apparently fixed, mostly immutable categories such as ‘nation’, ‘cultural practice’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘Empire’? Or, conversely, is the opposition of ‘Britain-as-subject’ and its panoply of archipelagic and colonial ‘objects’ essentially a tactical manoeuvre driven by ongoing investments in a particular kind of narrative economy? Does the narration of nationhood, in spite of the multiplicity of standpoints or cunning segues in time and location the historian evokes, always and inevitably depend on the persistence of specific rhetorical structures? To wit, a teleological orientation, the working out of time via the trope of linearity and, most significantly, an abiding motif of the nation as a ‘sovereign ontological subject’.1 As Edward Said notes in the introduction to Culture and Imperialism, ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism and one of the main connections between them.’2 If we were to trace this distinction between Britishness and Otherness inward from where we imagine the boundary of its ‘outside’ to be, an alternate series of questions would be provoked. How does the figure of the Other function to authorise specific conceptions of Britishness? Through what discursive techniques is the Other inaugurated and sustained? Is the Other only ever rendered strategically, as a cipher in a great cryptogram of imperial nationhood, or does it endure as a definitive (and therefore representative) presence? How can political and epistemic power be seen to operate in the critical separation of Britishness from its absolute exterior, the tyranny of its vast ‘not-self’? The conundrum of Britishness and Otherness is always and already a problem of the line and the boundary. That which presents itself as denotatively simple and grammatically efficient — the apparently modest copula ‘and’ — drives the terms Britishness/Otherness both together as an