Recovering Empire's critics

Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire

by Phyllis Lassner

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 241 pages

In the fall of 2004 Prince Harry of Wales was photographed at an exclusive party whose theme was Colonials and Natives. The prince came dressed in a Nazi SS uniform. The party's theme suggests that, for the wealthy elite of Britain, the memory of the empire lives on as part of the heritage of privilege. That Prince Harry wore a Nazi uniform suggests that although Britain and Germany were on opposite sides in World War II, there were similarities between them in their position as imperial forces. Indeed, perhaps these similarities will become more obvious with time, as people born decades after the war feel freer to gloss over the sufferings and privations it created and to feel nostalgia for glamorized images of power and intrigue that they associate with imperial Europe. That these glamorized images thrive today, in spite of the observance of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, suggests that the meaning of World War II continues to be contested.

Phyllis Lassner's Colonial Strangers investigates the relationship between colonial Britain and World War II. Lassner, a scholar of British and Irish literature of the modern and interwar periods, has made herself proficient in postcolonial theory in order to perform this investigation because she believes that postcolonial investigations have by and large ignored the relationship between World War II and the end of the British empire. She uses her proficiency to show how most postcolonial theorists, despite their interest in racialized discourse and its effects on imperial policy and practice, have omitted from their various paradigms an exploration of World War II and the racialized, eugenics-based discourse employed by the Nazis. This discourse was essential to the Nazis' program, enabling them to designate as degenerate (and then to wipe out) certain groups of people, in particular Jews and Gypsies. She observes:

    despite the fact that World War II was launched by the Axis powers
    as an imperial conquest based on racialist ideology and precipitated
    the end of all European empires, there has been little attempt to
    integrate this most cataclysmic event into the racially defined and
    ever-expanding and complicated postcolonial narrative. (3)

One of Lassner's focal concerns is to examine ways in which the British, as they waged war against the Axis powers, were compromised or challenged in their war effort by their investment in their imperial ventures. She came to choose this particular focus, she explains in the preface, through her studies of British women writers of World War II for her previous book, British Women Writers of World War II: Battlegrounds of Their Own. (Before that, Lassner wrote two studies of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.) As she studied the works of British women writers, she discovered among some of them a preoccupation with the problem of their colonial identity as they waged a war for freedom against another colonial power. Their experience confronting the Nazi imperial plan convinced them, Lassner states, "that all empires must end" (6).

Of course, the British had been comparing themselves to other European empires for centuries, and indeed, one way they justified their continued imperial activity was through this comparison. They believed, or wanted to believe, that their empire was the morally superior imperial force because it improved the lives of its subjects, for example by suppressing suttee and female infant exposure in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and because it could regulate itself, having abolished the slave trade with the Emancipation Act of 1834.Though books such as Heart of Darkness have been viewed with suspicion in the last few decades because they replicate the power structures of empire, the suggestion that the British were self-serving when they claimed to have gone to Africa and Asia and the Americas to bring light to the darkness was not readily accepted by most Britons as they entered the twentieth century.

Why did this exercise in comparison and contrast, formerly so reassuring, finally break down? The writers Lassner studies in this book did not "creat[e] an equivalence" between the Nazis and the British, she notes. After all,

    colonialism is about brutal and murderous exploitation, but it is
    not about exterminating an entire people for the purpose of
    purifying the world of their poisonous presence, in short, through a
    purposefully conceived policy of lethal social engineering. (6)

Nevertheless, "For many British women writers who witnessed the Hitlerian translation of imperial racism into mass extermination, no further evidence was needed to prove that all empires must end."

For Lassner, the key to these writers' insights lay in their gender. As female members of the empire, their status was already marginalized, their positions--at least to some degree--always in question. She treats a large group of writers in this book, and their experiences with the British Empire varied widely in personal biography and geographic location. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter treats the Middle East and focuses on the work of Olivia Manning, Muriel Spark, and Ethel Mannin. The second chapter is concerned with India and features the work of Rumer Godden. The third chapter handles the British imperial presence in Kenya through the work of Elspeth Huxley, and the fourth chapter treats two Caribbean islands: Dominica through the work of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, and Jamaica through the work of Phyllis Bottome.