Empire Writes Back Research Articles

Beynəlxalq münasibətlər diskursunda postkolonializm

Turning to history has always been an important tool for understanding international relations, and this trend remains relevant today. However, if earlier researchers mainly focused on individual events and their possible interpretations, now the main attention is focused on determining the historical characteristics of systems and reflecting this legacy in modern international relations. That is why the postcolonial approach, focused on the gradual evolution of colonial relations into the modern system of international relations, has become especially important; postmodernism is used to explain the concept of postcolonialism. In these concepts, an important place is occupied by the terms colonialism and postcolonialism, which seem to be a continuation of each other, despite the fact that they oppose each other. This article explains some of these concepts. Looking at the development and theoretical history of the concept of postcolonialism, it can be concluded that the concept was first used by Edward Said in his work entitled “Orientalism”. In Edward Said's “Orientalism” (1978) [Said, 1978], although many derivative terms from the concepts of colonialism and imperialism are used, the word postcolonialism does not appear even once in this work. No less important than Edward Said's research into the consolidation of postcolonialism as a concept is Subaltern Studies, first developed by Indian Marxist historians in 1982. Thus, although postcolonialism has not yet reached its final form in terms of naming, thanks to the book "The Empire Writes Back" [Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989] published in 1989, today both the term and the theoretical concept are used in modern scientific circles.

MONIZA ALVI’S DIASPORIC SENSIBILITY IN CONSTRUCTING GENDER IN SPLIT WORLD POEMS AND BLACK BIRD BYE BYE

Dislocation form a foremost concern for all the colonized indigenous people, acting as a model for the phenomenon of diaspora. This results not just in cultural assignation but cultural rotation as well. The research derives guide from Ashcroft, Tiffin and Grifith’s seminal work, The Empire Writes Back in examining how dislocation from a place creates concerns concerning identity and authenticity on the behalf of the writer in question. This particular methodology emphasizes on the appropriateness of an external language for the description of indigenous people in postcolonial diaspora literature. Krippendorff’s textual analysis method, “Content Analysis” is used to explore and collect the themes in relativeness to women, men and place from the poetic works of Moniza Alvi along with a postcolonial theory in the background. The present study discusses how Moniza Alvi’s diasporic sensibility discursively constructs indigenous female in the Split World Poems and male in Black Bird Bye Bye, respectively. Keywords: diaspora, discursive, indigenous, place, gender, postcolonial.

Wakefield's Offspring

Wakefield's Offspring

Violence

Violence

Dark Portrayal of Gender: A Post-colonial Feminist Reflection of Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-candy Man

The portrayals of women by fiction writers of Indian sub-continent can be seen in the context of postcolonial feminism. Sidhwa’s novels may be a part of postcolonial fiction, which is fiction produced mostly in the former British colonies. As Bill Ashcroft suggests in The Empire Writes Back, the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the colonizers. About the role of postcolonial literature with respect to feminism, Ashcroft writes, “Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writings and through other arts such as paintings sculpture, music, and dance that today realities experienced by the colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential.” Indian sub-continent fiction is the continuation and extension of the fiction produced under the colonial rulers in undivided India. As such it has inherited all the pros and cons of the fiction in India before the end of colonial rule in Indo-Pak. Feminism has been one part of this larger body of literature. Sidhwa has portrayed the lives of Pakistani women in dark shades under the imposing role of religious, social, and economic parameters. These roles presented in The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-Candy Man are partly traditional and partly modern – the realities women face.

Translating the ‘Other’ for the Western World for more than a decade: Incredible India! campaigns

When we analyse and translate tourist texts promoting or dealing with nonWestern destinations we certainly have to take into account the weight of postcolonial discourses in the representation of these places in the tourist field. Many ex-colonies have become popular tourist destinations, while the detritus of post-colonialism have been transformed into tourist sights, including exotic peoples and customs; artefacts; indigenous lifestyles and cultural heritage (Craik). Therefore, if tourism reinforces postcolonial relationships, tourist texts are deeply embedded in colonial discourses. Some scholars have argued that tourism is a form of “leisure imperialism” and represents “the hedonistic face of neocolonialism” (Crick 322). Hall and Tucker have dedicated a volume to the relation between postcolonial thought and tourism referring back to Edward Said’s seminal work on Orientalism (1978) and to Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), both works which outline the ontological and epistemological distinction that has been made between the Western world and the ‘Other’. Encounters with the non-Western have always provided fuel for myths and mythical language and tourism has developed its own promotional lexicon and repertoire of myths (Selwyn), and as a matter of fact, otherness can be an element that makes a destination worth a visit. Studies have demonstrated how the representation of the ‘Other’ is closely linked to the popularization of accounts of travels and explorations in imperial lands (Pratt; Spurr), and sadly this representation is still part of tourist place promotion (Hall and Page). It is a fact that tourism plays a central role in transforming collective and individual values through ideas of commoditization (Cohen), which implies that what were once cultural displays of living traditions or cultural texts of lived authenticity become cultural products that meet the needs of commercial tourism, as well as the construction of a supposed heritage. Such a situation leads to the invention of traditions and heritage for external consumption that meet visitors’ conceptions of the other (Helu-Thaman; Cronin et al.). A good example of representing a non-Western destination at an international level is the Indian campaign Incredible India launched in 2002 for the European, Asian Saggi/Ensayos/Essais/Essays N. 21 – 05/2019 125 and Middle East markets (Kant). Undertaken by the Government of India to promote India Tourism all over the world, the campaign was released by Ogilvy and Mather India in media print, internet and television. My analysis wants to outline how the main themes of the campaign (yoga, Ayurveda and other spirituality-related concepts, Indian cultures and culinary traditions and festivals all around the country, the cultural heritage and the natural resources) have been developed through time in order to ‘translate’ the uniqueness of India for the Western tourist in the last 15 years. The campaign Incredible India has been developed and renewed over the past few years and is still ongoing. My analysis will follow two stages: in the first I will deal with linguistic and visual techniques that create a determinate idea of India as a tourist destination, in the second I will compare texts in English with their translation into Italian, and specifically the creation of a campaign aimed at Italian tourists.

Reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks As A Call For Human Enhancement

The present paper examines the emergence of a discourse of resistance to oppressive ideologies and racist structureswith reference to Frantz Fanon’sBlack Skin White Masks (1952). The task is to examine how the author came up with a narrative of his own whereby to oppose the socio-political and cultural aggression ofBlack people bytargeting all the institutions, which are complicit in the perpetuation of racism and developing of an inferiority complex. The analysis of cultural representations through characters of Fanon’s bookwill be conducted under the theoretical scheme suggested by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their book entitled The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (1989). The focus in this paper will beput on the discursive and textual strategies with which Fanonsubverts and revises the Eurocentric prejudices, stereotypes, and representations of the Black Man.

The Empire Writes Back—Writing Back to the Empire

The article offers a comparison between the representations of the former ussr in contemporary Ukrainian literature from Galicia and from the eastern part of Ukraine. In the main it focuses on the writers Yuri Andrukhovych, Serhiy Zhadan, and Lyubko Deresh. In Andrukhovych’s novels and essays, the former Habsburg monarchy is represented as a positive, liberal counterpart to Soviet collectivism and uniformity; Zhadan, in his poetry, depicts the cultural situation in Eastern Ukraine as a kind of a post-Soviet void; Deresh, finally, in his successful pop novels denies any further relevance of Soviet heritage in Galicia.

The Translingualism of Kurdish Writers: A Postcolonial Reading of Ali-Ashraf Darvishian’s Autobiographical Novel Sālhāyi Abrī (Cloudy Years)

This paper examines the phenomenon of “literary translingualism” in Cloudy Years (2000), an autobiographical Persian novel by a Kurdish writer, Ali-Ashraf Darvishian. By drawing on strategies of appropriation proposed by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (1989), this paper shows how Darvishian has incorporated the Kurdish dialect and culture of his hometown into his Persian narrative, thus highlighting his cultural distinctiveness while writing in the only official language of his country. The postcolonial reading of Cloudy Years affirms that writing in any of the dominant languages of Persian, Turkish, and Arabic does not necessarily mean the assimilation of a Kurdish writer into the dominant culture. On the contrary, hybrid translingual texts such as Cloudy Years not only defy the state-imposed monoculturalism but also manifest a hybridity that is emblematic of the country’s heterogeneous ethno-cultural makeup.

Saviana Stănescu’s Barbarian women: the Empire Writes Back to Ovid

This article discusses the Romanian playwright Saviana Stănescu and her continued engagement with the works of Ovid, tracking the feminist methodology which links her varied work. While Ovid’s self-definition against the ‘barbarian others’ he encounters in Tomis is crucial to an understanding of the exile poetry, in a postcolonial world the ideologically loaded nature of the term barbarus must be recognized, and its use and replication in modern translations and receptions interrogated. Characterized by an astute critical awareness and a committed political engagement, Stănescu’s classical receptions draw out the damaging real-world consequences for a people labelled ‘barbarians’. Her work offers a defence of the reviled Black Sea inhabitants of Ovid’s exilic poems by providing a critique of the colonial representations of the ‘barbarians’ therein, and exposing the power mechanisms of ancient and contemporary imperialism alike.

The Other Jamaica: Music and the City in Jamaican Film

to camp whe' di thugs dem camp at Two pound a weed inna van back-Damian Junior Gong Marley, Welcome to JamrockDAMiAn JunioR gong MARLey 's gRAMMy-winning song Welcome to Jamrock1 creates a paradigm shift in representation of place. The song plays phrase Welcome to greeting traditionally extended to visitors to island, which is endlessly played upon in tourism industry. Marley proclaims, Welcome to substituting name which Jamaicans at home and in diaspora affectionately, and sometimes ironically, use to refer to their country. Marley's switch directs our attention to often gaping discrepancies between image of offered by tourism interests to lure visitors, and realities experienced by those on ground. Welcome to Jamrock describes in ways that would scare off most intrepid tourist: in this song is envisioned as a site for violent crime, drug trade, poverty, civil unrest, thuggery and political violence. For public commentator Ian Boyne, song inserts Marley into the classic role of prophet who disturbs, afflicts and tortures comforted with pictures and images not in concert with vision of ruling class. The song lives up well to its genre of protest music, Boyne states, jolting complacent who would soon forget other Jamaica.2The notion of the other Jamaica invites consideration of politics of representation. Welcome to Jamrock was a controversial song and many Jamaicans, as Boyne reports, objected to Marley's characterisation of country. The reasons for such protests are complex. Although Marley's version of is a shameful one that may not accord with either formal representations of or lived experiences of upper and middle classes, there are few who would deny that at least some aspects of this other exist. The success of song locally - and, significantly, beyond Jamaica's shores - indicated, however, that in struggle over representation of place, this version of Jamaica, which privileges perspective of underclass, those margins of society, was gaining a high degree of public attention and therefore some measure of dominance.The transformative representation of place that occurs in Welcome to Jamrock and controversy that it created speak to ongoing tension that arises in and around construction of place as competing points of view struggle for dominance and, further, disturb idea that local point of view is a homogenous or unified one. Welcome to Jamrock, therefore, is a useful point of departure from which to begin exploring these issues in Jamaican cinema. The paradigm shift in representation of place that occurs in Marley's song is also evident in a number of Jamaican and is frequently produced in these texts, in part, through use of popular music. In this essay I comment project of reclaiming place in Jamaican fictional film and specifically address a grouping within that body of work - what I refer to as city films - in which project of reclaiming place is urgent and compelling.3 I identify use of popular forms of Jamaican music in this group of as a key component in articulation of a local cinematic voice. I argue that although extensive use of popular music plays an important role in films' commercial viability in overseas markets, it also endows with transformative possibilities, and is fundamental to construction of perspectives which privilege experiences of marginalised Jamaicans.In their early seminal work The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin identify concern with place and displacement as a major feature of postcolonial literatures. It is here, they suggest, that special postcolonial crisis of identity comes into being, often expressed as a concern with development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place. …

The Empire Writes Back: African Challenges to the Brutish (South African) Empire in the Early 20th Century

This paper examines African critical views on empires in the early 20th century. Historians regard modern African challenges to empire and the settler state in South(ern) Africa as a post-Second World War phenomenon; before then, entrenched empire loyalism among black elites held sway. I argue that while loyalism remained influential, black intellectuals and political leaders, from the earliest articulation of African nationalism, began to critique European and South African empires qua empire just as they first began to synchronise their forces across the terrain of a South African state aggressively developing imperial ambitions. In this counter-discourse, Africans adapted, inverted and subverted polite imperial discourse in their press, speeches and praise poetry that eulogised past African empires and criticised, even condemned, Boer and British imperialism. British Empire, South African empire, African empire; all this requires a re-figuring of how historians conceive African response to empire.

Law’s Empire Writes Back: Legal Positivism and Literary Rejoinder in Wilde’sDe Profundis

“Law’s Empire Writes Back” queries the relationships among subjectivity, agency, and liberal jurisprudence against the backdrop of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis . Examining the trial proceedings that led to Wilde’s eventual incarceration and, arguably, demise, Dale Barleben argues that the trial apparatus, which searches for “truth,” instead manufactures guilt in many instances. Juxtaposing contemporary literary and legal scholarship with accounts of Wilde’s trials, Barleben extrapolates theories of trauma and confession, focusing on the trial as a performance in which the actors often become the characters they play. The ontological shift in Wilde’s writing before and after trial evidences the change in Wilde’s thinking about his subjectivity and identity—changes, argues Barleben, which are direct results of the traumas of trial procedure.

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. UK: New Accents, 1989. 2 The 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium was co-organized by Laura Ceia and Aparna Nayak in Long Beach, CA, in March 2012. Aparna Nayak is guest co-editor of CF&FS: SITES 17.4; Laura Ceia will be guest co-editor of 17.5.

The Empire Writes Back…Back: Postcolonial Studies in an Age of Autogenic War

This essay attempts to disclose a uniquely volatile nexus that implicates – and perhaps, reinvigorates – a postcolonial analytics of insurgency. This nexus includes three strands of inquiry: the first is the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), which really is – albeit in a qualified sense – revolutionary. War is doing new things with time and space through culture, media, and data technology, and in the process is mutating not only what it means to be a part of this or that national group but is also changing what it means to be human. The second strand of inquiry focuses on the legacy of postcolonial studies, particularly the notion of ‘writing back’ which, I contend, is an apposite starting point for writing critically about the RMA. Apposite though it is, there are limits to postcolonial studies in the contemporary war context. This is so because while the divisions of individual difference are shifting, the coherence of the nation state itself is undergoing radical change. Moving outward in scope to a planetary scale, the human being per se is no longer a primary category by and for which war is happening today. Thus the third strand of inquiry is focused on the residual anthropomorphic tendencies within postcolonial studies that too narrowly limit discussions of violence and collective belonging. The concept of the human being per se remains reliant on early models of technology and media (namely, writing and literature, usually novels). Therefore, in the context of an ever-expanding global war machine, ‘writing back’ is a concept that requires fine-tuning and revision.

Nakagami Kenji's 'Writing Back to the Centre' through the Subaltern Narrative: Reading the Hidden Outcast Voice in 'Misaki' and Karekinada

The aim of this thesis is to give a post-colonial reading of selected narratives by Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992). Nakagami was the first Akutagawa Prize winning novelist from Japan’s outcaste Burakumin group. Through the production of narrative about this subaltern community, Nakagami confronted the exclusionary systems of hegemonic Japanese thought and the structures created by these systems which deny the principle and lived experience of ‘difference’. Borrowing the post-colonial concept of ‘writing back’ to the hegemonic centre from the work of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back, this article will analyse Nakagami’s ‘Misaki’ (1976, The Cape), and its sequel, Karekinada (1977, The Sea of Withered Trees). The principal focus will be on Nakagami’s representation of the hidden voice of those on the margins of Japanese society. This approach will position the Burakumin as ‘subalterns’ to the mainstream Japanese society on the basis of Antonio Gramsci’s view of the group. The analysis of ‘Misaki’ and Karekinada will begin with an investigation of Kishu Kumano as a site on the margins of mainstream Japanese society. In analysing these two novels as subaltern narratives, close attention will be given to Nakagami’s use of intertextuality particularly with oral kishu ryuritan folklore.

Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic (review)

Reviewed by: Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic Jonathan Eburne John Cullen Gruesser . Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005. Xi + 177 pp. John Cullen Gruesser's Confluences argues persuasively for a critical deterritorialization of the three fields of literary criticism that form the book's subtitle: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. Structurally, Gruesser's book takes the form of a collection of literary essays on African American and postcolonial fiction; yet in its argument and critical scope, the book might be described more aptly as a discourse on method. Through its close readings of a wide range of English-language texts, Confluences offers an investigation into the critical methodologies for literary study proffered by the three critical fields the book strives to place in conversation. Gruesser recognizes that a full study of the relations between postcolonialism, African American literary studies, and the Black Atlantic would require a "comprehensive engagement with the history of anticolonial struggles, a history that ought to take account of African American experience and cultural productions but must not minimize the extent to which these diverge from those of colonized and formerly colonized peoples" (132). While arguing for the value of such a comprehensive engagement, Gruessser's own study is emphatically literary; it focuses on the theories of intertextuality featured in each of the critical fields he studies, rather than on the intellectual history or geopolitical conditions of the fields themselves. The book's purpose is explicit: Gruesser seeks within the "confluences" he studies a critical paradigm for the study of literature of the black diaspora that neither falls back on racial essentialism nor loses its racial specificity in the vagaries of internationalism or textual play. In particular, Gruesser stresses that the strategies of African American literature and literary studies are more than simply conversant with postcolonial and Black Atlantic theories; they are integral to the development and circulation of diasporic criticism and literature alike. Likewise, Confluences [End Page 748] argues for the significance of reading African American literature in this circum-Atlantic critical and literary framework, offering valuable readings of texts by Alice Walker, Pauline Hopkins, and Harriet Jacobs that highlight their strategic, if under-acknowledged, focus on transatlantic travel. Confluences proposes that postcolonial and African American literary studies each advocate the political exigency of rewriting earlier narratives as a practice of counter-discourse, which he defines as "a historically based and political motivated response to a dominant discourse that calls the terms of that discourse, as well as its own, into question" (55). This notion of counter-discourse is, for Gruesser, the common object of interest for scholars of postcolonialism, African American literary study, and the Black Atlantic. In support of this claim, Gruesser isolates three theoretical models—Bill Ashcroft's, Gareth Griffiths's, and Helen Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back (1989), Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey (1988), and Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993)—that develop notions of counter-discourse within their different disciplinary contexts. While these three models hardly exhaust the fields of study they are made here to represent, they do serve Gruesser's purpose in demonstrating how their approaches to literary relations of intertextuality are communicable. Gruesser's goal is to extend the postcolonial notion of "writing back" against Empire beyond its largely Anglophone—and British—literary context, as well as to extend Gates's notion of "Signifyin(g)" beyond its Americanist context. To this end, Gruesser turns to Gilroy's notion of the Black Atlantic as a circuit of transnational and transatlantic exchanges; Gilroy's work is significant for Gruesser for its "stress on movement through space" that "promotes the discovery of cross-cultural influence among peoples of African descent" (20), and which thus literally expands the terrains of postcolonial and African American literary studies alike. Yet like the two critical fields it helps Gruesser synthesize, even Gilroy's "Black Atlantic" model "assigns a privileged, mediating position to Britain" and only uses "the lives and texts of black American males to illustrate [its] major points" (128). Gruesser's aim is thus both to show the continuities between the...

Introduction. What the postcolonial means to us: European literature(s) and postcolonialism

‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘postcolonial’ are fashionable terms in literary studies these days. Henk Wesseling, in his ‘Editorial’ in the European Review (12(3): 267–271, 2004), with regard to another fashionable term, ‘empire,’ warned that the same word may mean different things to different people. So too it is with ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’.To begin with, there is the matter of orthography. I have used unhyphenated ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism.’ In fact, the hyphenated forms are the older and more conventional. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin use them in their 1989 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, still a landmark publication in the field, as does John Thieme in his 1996 Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. Both restrict the use of ‘post-colonial’ to ‘writing by those peoples formerly colonized by Britain’ (Ref. 1, p. 1) and ‘the anglophone literatures of countries other than Britain and the United States’ (Ref. 2, p. 1). Both spurn chronology, reaching back to the 19th and early 20th centuries for examples of ‘post-colonial’ literature. Ashcroft et al. and Thieme thoroughly differ, though, as to the term's precise charge. Ashcroft et al. see ‘post-colonialism’ as covering ‘all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day,’ and this because they find there to be ‘a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’ (Ref. 1, p. 2). Thieme finds this use of the term problematic, because of its association with ‘writing and other forms of cultural production which display an oppositional attitude towards colonialism, which are to a greater or lesser degree anti-colonial in orientation’ (Ref. 2, p. 1-2).

Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim

Hegemony, national allegory, exile: The poetry of Shirley Lim

Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press (review)

Reviewed by: Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press Lynn Zastoupil (bio) Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, edited by Julie F. Codell; pp. 328. Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2003, $57.50, £42.50. This volume directs our attention to an underappreciated subject ripe with fascinating possibilities: print media as a paper trail documenting the circulation of people, ideas, and technologies during the Age of Empire. That this circulation produced linked stories ("co-histories") in metropole and colony is editor Julie F. Codell's main point, one that resonates with recent publications by Catherine Hall (Civilising Subjects, 2002) and Peter van der Veer (Imperial Encounters, 2001). Whether the contributors here all speak to Codell's point is doubtful: several essays do hit close to the mark, while others are simply full of isolated insights that readers of Victorian Studies will appreciate. [End Page 153] Codell divides her collection into two parts. The first, she claims, "examines the press's intervention to align native identity with British imperial authority and domination" (22). Alex Nalbach's essay does no such thing, exploring instead the transnational politics of telegraphic news agencies in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the decades leading up to the First World War. Deepali Dewan's contribution, however, does justice to Codell's claim by examining the illustrated Journal of Indian Art and Industry as a colonial attempt to define and preserve Indian artistic traditions. Dewan argues that this attempt was linked to the British Arts and Crafts movement, but fails to engage the work of others who have addressed this subject, such as Thomas Metcalf (An Imperial Vision, 1989). Michael Hancher's essay briefly considers how The Imperial Gazetteer recycled colonial images of coolies, the caste system, and "nautch girls" in ways supportive of the imperial project. David Finkelstein's account of Blackwood's Magazine in the waning decades of the nineteenth century may not say much about aligning native identities, but it does bring home why the concept of co-histories is important. Not only did this journal come to represent conservative establishment views on the Empire, but its founding editorial family had deep roots in Indian colonial service. Carefully cultivating a readership among colonial officials and expatriates, Blackwood's took pains to promote that group's interests. What exactly such conscientious tending had to do with the publication of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1899– 1900), as well as literary works by other authors, is, alas, but hinted at here. Missing from part one of this volume is any essay on the use of print media by the colonized. All of the essays here address western, mostly European, journalistic ventures where, perhaps, the fashioning of native identities was the norm. But the objects of empire were not always passive victims. A thriving indigenous press scene was present in Calcutta, for example, from the 1820s onwards. It would have been helpful to consider as well what positions Indian editors took on matters such as local and imperial identities, the responsibilities of British rule, and the nature of the media. Fortunately, Codell provides a partial remedy for this in the second part of Imperial Co-Histories, where the attention shifts to tensions in the representation of empire. Codell's own essay, "The Empire Writes Back," deftly explores contributions by R. C. Dutt, Jamal-al-Din al-Afghani, Cornelia Sorabji, Rafiüddin Ahmad, and other western- educated elites to such prominent journals as The Nineteenth Century, The Westminster Review, and The Contemporary Review. She cogently demonstrates how these well-educated, highly assimilated Indians sought to provincialize British assumptions and open up imperial debates to Indian voices. Reminding British audiences of their status as "native experts," they openly criticized bad policies, raised the specter of revolt if this criticism was ignored, and attempted to add nuance and complexity to British perceptions of native character. What impact their contributions had on late-Victorian reading audiences, one hopes, will be the subject of a follow-up essay. Also valuable in part two is Aled Jones's essay on...