Introduction:
Postcolonial Nostalgia and the Threads
of Empires
Giusi Russo
Guest Editor
In his influential 1989 essay titled “Imperialist Nostalgia” anthropologist
Renato Rosaldo declares his “anger at recent films that portray the empire
with nostalgia”—identifying the “enthusiastic reception” of Heat and Dust,
A Passage to India (1984), Out of Africa (1985) and The Gods Must Be Crazy as
the source of his ire (Rosaldo 107). Nostalgia, as the old graffito has it, may
not be what it used to be, but thirty years after Rosaldo’s broadside, similar
products still occupy plenty of space in the Western mediascape. Still peddling the longing for an imperial past, films like Victoria and Abdul, The Man
Who Knew Infinity, and The Viceroy’s House all share common threads with
their 1980s precursors; both A Passage to India and Victoria and Abdul, for
example, depict the surveillance of brown bodies in constructed British
spaces suggesting, given the success of these artifacts in the West, that the
insidious desire to survey the racial other persists well into the twenty-first
century.
Of course, contemporary nostalgia goes beyond cinematic accounts and
in fact seems to pervade contemporary society: in a 2016 article on Donald
Trump’s design to take America back to its white-only glory, Pulitzer Prizewinner Lynn Nottage described nostalgia as a disease; her diagnosis recalls
historian Matt Matsuda’s work on eighteenth-century European journeys to
the Pacific in which he defines nostalgia as “a physical and mental malady,
a quality of melancholy, displacement, and homesickness.”
Whether or not nostalgia is a diagnosable medical condition, it is plainly
resilient as a way of thinking about and representing empire and colonialism. Like the imperial project, nostalgia has gone global producing a network of expected and unexpected longings and of provocations that tend
to ignore the violence of the imperial projects. The 2010 New York Times’s
Vietnamese tour on “Recreating French Roots,” the 2015–16 British Channel 4 television series Indian Summer, and the countless advertisements for
chic and glamorous tourist “safaris” demonstrate that the disease of imagining a return to the glorious colonial past is still alive and well—and economically relevant, to boot.
What inspired this volume was not just the general persistence of imperial nostalgia but the specific contradiction lurking within the imperial design
Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies
doi: 10.5744/jcps.2019.1001
Vol. 7 No. 2 2019
Copyright © University of Florida Press
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that Rosaldo described in 1989: supposedly motivated by their “peculiar
sense of mission, the white man’s burden,” Europeans “intentionally altered
or destroyed” the cultures they colonized, but later bemoaned the passing
of those very cultures. In Rosaldo’s opinion, “imperialist nostalgia . . .
revolves around a paradox,” with the agents of colonialism “mourn[ing] the
passing of what they themselves . . . transformed” (Rosaldo 108). The essays
in this volume duly analyze contemporary versions of this paradox.
If the current state of the world is responsible for the continued wave
of nostalgic renditions of the imperial past, this historical context has been
producing multiple accounts of how the colonial past still hinges on the
national and transnational present. In the wake of decolonization and the
collapse of the old Cold War global order, contemporary migrations, geopolitics, and challenging assimilations make the memory of empires divisive and problematic at best. If the modern post-imperial nation wants to
be secular and pluralist it should recognize a past that damaged a substantial portion of its population. There is a moral reckoning to be made for what
colonial administrations did, along with acknowledgments that the skewed
economic processes put in place by imperialism not only benefitted the
home-nations during the time of empire, but have continued to do so ever
since.
The questions we posed in our call for papers centered on the relationship between the longed-for past and the conditions of the present that shape
the memory of empires. Moreover, we were interested in who remembers
what, and with what outcome. When we first conceived of this special issue,
the electoral rhetoric in Europe and the united States was recalling a past
of rigid hierarchies such as the imperial one which threatened the struggle
for contemporary minorities and endangered even further the multicultural
western project. It was evident in the run-ups to the Brexit referendum of
June 2016 and the American presidential election of November that year, that
postcolonial nostalgia had emerged forcefully in the Anglophone public
sphere. Thus, we were fully expecting our call for papers to result in essays
that addressed the specifically British longing for empire. However, in the
same way that Rosaldo’s essay moves away from the obvious locales of Raj
and safari depicted in the movies that stoked his anger to an analysis of the
much less frequently covered phenomenon of American imperialism in the
Philippines, the contributors to this volume also took us to unexpected locations to give us their accounts of imperial nostalgia and postcolonial
modalities of remembering. The issue follows the objects of nostalgia, from
nostalgia of possibilities, of what might have been, to nostalgia of imperial
actualities. The last three articles discuss the unexpectedly simultaneous
presence of progressive and conservative nostalgias. As a collection, the articles thus represent a continuum of nostalgia: from longing for moments of
missed possibilities such as pluralism in pre-partition India or resistance
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in colonial Korea to putting together the longing for empire under the form
of political speeches and public exhibitions. Even the negative rhetoric on
empires contributes to recasting it at the center of public discourse.
The analyses the contributors to this volume provide on the modalities
and consequences of remembering empire provide an alternative thread to
the dominant narratives of imperial history of the present. Among other
things, they expose how the incoherent nuances of the past complicate historical trajectories and encourage reformulation of the relationship between
countries and their imperial pasts.
Contrary to the usual suspects of postcolonial theory (Spivak et al.) who
put the British and French empires at the center of their writings, the work
of Svetlana Boym focuses on the Soviet collapse and changes in European
borders. Boym’s theoretical interpretation of contemporary modes of remembering presents us with the history of nostalgia itself, initially medical and
then social and political. In Boym’s words “Nostalgia (from nostos—return
home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or
has never existed” (Boym xiii). Boym shows us that “While the longing is
universal, nostalgia can be divisive” (Boym xiii). In the case of nostalgia as
part of a white supremacist nationalist project, what repairs the longing is
belonging. Boym is also sympathetic towards the nostalgic who longs “for
continuity in a fragmented world” (Boym xiv); his/her present desire for a
constructed continuity is also irresponsible, because there is no such thing
as “a guilt free homecoming” in which history is transformed into a “private or collective mythology”; the nostalgic person may desire “to revisit
time like space” as if time could remain static, but there is really no responsible way to avoid “the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Boym xv).
Modernity and its variations dominate this volume. Still an elusive concept, modernity appears as a tool to create and to erase, to remember and to
forget, to dismember and to unify. A number of authors elaborate on Boym’s
“unrealized possibilities” as the essays of Bhagat-Kennedy, Kim, and
Saxena show. Kim, in particular, shows us a specific formulation of “offmodernism” which in Boym’s configuration illustrates “a critique of both
the modern fascination with newness and the no less modern reinvention
of tradition” (Boym xvii) Some of the authors engage directly with Boym’s
taxonomy of nostalgia, picking up on her distinction between restorative
and reflective forms:
Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the
longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of
itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective
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nostalgia dwells on the ambivalence of human longing and
belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of
modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth,
while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. (Boym xviii)
Collectively, these essays complicate the notion that the age of empire
ended and was succeeded by a steady process of decolonization. The contributions to this volume show a much more complex scenario in which
empire is transnationally adaptive, useful to a contemporary nationalist
rhetoric, and still exerting influence in global economic processes. Furthermore, these essays show that remembering, too, is a non-linear and fragmented process that goes back and forth. For instance, imperial nostalgia
can manifest itself in contemporary anti-migration attitudes, which seek to
reinstate the kinds of separation and segregationist policies that marked the
age of empire. ultimately, the connection between empires and national
identity assumes the rationale of fascist modernities through which the glorification of the nation built proud and patriotic citizens. Such processes
happened mostly through a white-ification of the national project, since the
painful memory of victims of imperialism is allowed no space to establish
a counter-memory.
The issue opens with two accounts of what might have been, and concludes with three accounts of what is. The authors show that there are nostalgic products that look at past possibilities of unity in the case of Indian
Hindus and Muslims, and reaction to assimilation in the case of the Koreans under Japanese rule. Both accounts confirm the presence of longing for
lost possibilities that in one case affect the present and in the other produce
what author Andrew Kim calls “the teleology of liberation.” Monika BhagatKennedy’s article discusses the relationship between history and national
identity. She juxtaposes the physical/material/hyper-visible monument of
the Taj Mahal and its invisibility in contemporary Hindu nationalist discourse with Ahmed Ali’s 1939 novel Twilight in Delhi and Ali’s nostalgia for
the lost possibility of unity between Hindus and Muslims. The British
Empire is present in this work in the form of divider of local forces and as
a tool of Hindu nationalist ideology. According to Bhaghat-Kennedy, Twilight
longs for what true pluralism might have been through the narration of a
lost Delhi center of Muslim ashraf, a memory lost today. Bhaghat-Kennedy’s
essay inaugurates the traumatic thread of this volume. For her, both past
and present are traumatic because of the violent acts of erasing Muslims
from the Indian nation’s design. More authors in this volume discuss how
the colonial state’s erasure of minorities was part of colonial modernity.
Twilight as literary monumentalization aids the Taj Mahal/monument to
reclaim its place in India’s past and, therefore, in its present, too.
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Dealing with erasing colonial modernities and the nostalgia of what
might have been is also what drives Andrew Kim’s essay on 2016 Korean
movie The Handmaiden. According to Kim, the movie’s suggestive reconstruction of colonial Korea provides a tool to look back at the “options
available to Korea” before the forced Japanese process of assimilation. Koreans went from subservient colonial peoples to “imperial subjects,” and the
movie tells us a story of what alternatives might have existed at the climax
of colonialism. Kim presents us with a scenario of two women who are both
victims and perpetrators of the imperial order of things. They are victims
because of the patriarchal component in imperial modernities, but they are
also able to rise above victimhood because they subvert the sexual order
by defeating their male enemy and escaping to Shanghai together as lovers. Kim shows us how The Handmaiden entertains with a different understanding of conquering people and lands. In Kim’s view even the Japanese
Empire is, in its own terms, conquered by the West—specifically by England.
Victorian and Edwardian narratives seem to appropriate the destiny of the
two female protagonists of The Handmaiden. The Korean male protagonist
of the film is nostalgic of precolonial Japan but simultaneously assumes
the role of the colonizer in order to defraud a Japanese woman. Kim, therefore, shows us that intrinsic to colonial modernity are both modernities and
anachronisms as well as a disruption and blending of patriarchal and colonial orders.
After these tales of possibilities, the issue follows the actualities of
empires not just by analyzing the trauma of empire but also by recasting
the British as architects of fractures that weakened the postcolonial state.
Vandana Saxena takes us to the lost unity of precolonial and colonial struggle in mid-twentieth-century Malaya. Saxena, similarly to Bhagat-Kennedy,
discusses a novel in order to show the relationship between trauma and nostalgia. In the case of Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists, however,
Saxena focuses on Boym’s theory of algia and “loss”—the kind of nostalgia
that imposes forgetting of the local conflicts in the struggle for decolonization (Bhagat-Kennedy by contrast wants to find a possible precolonial unity).
This nostalgic longing appears because the present circumstances prompt
characters to look back rather than forward. Saxena tells us about the multiple, ethnically varied anti-colonial forces that contributed to the foundation of the Malaysian nation, including the Chinese community (alas always
accused by the Malays of being loyal only to China) and an anti-British
Dutch farmer who calls his farm “Majuba” in honor of the Boer victory. The
British imperial politics here too are responsible for undermining the possibility for future pluralism of the postcolonial state; the British claimed that
the legitimacy of British power was founded on the myth of the “primacy
of the Malay community in Malaya.” Saxena instead presents a nostalgic
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scenario in which multiple groups—the Malay, the Chinese, and even the
Japanese—participated in the anti-colonial struggle. The protagonist of The
Garden of Evening Mists is the embodiment of trauma and nostalgia, arising
from her own betrayal and collaboration with the Japanese, and manifesting in her building a Japanese garden that is both a celebration of past happiness and a mourning for lost love. However, Saxena encourages us not to
heal in the postcolonial sphere but to recover: the difference between healing
and recovering lies in the presence of memory, in the process of recovering,
and the conflictual memory of the protagonist stays intact. By paying attention to the ambivalently-situated tea-planter Magnus, who has named his
plantation Majuba in memory of his Boer ancestors’ victory over the British
in the 1880s, Saxena adds a transnational angle that points to the mobility of
nostalgia. Himself a settler-colonist in an imperial locale, Magnus’s longing
for his own Boer identity prompts a thoroughly transnational understanding
of nostalgia.
Following on from Saxena’s essay, Erica Lombard’s essay shows the
extent to which postcolonial nations’ attempts at autonomous definition may
still be compromised by external forces. In the publication and marketing
of Lisa Fugard’s Skinner’s Drift Lombard analyzes what happens when the
nostalgic person longing for a South African “home” is not South African,
but based elsewhere. Lombard’s essay presents us with a dual layer of nostalgia, one present in the novel itself, and one in the readers of the novel in
a uS setting. The protagonist of Skinner’s Drift longs for a lost past, the immediate post-apartheid (after 1994), a lost home, and a lost season of life. Lombard complicates the national narrative of nostalgia and the traditional
colonizer/colonized dichotomy, however. In her essay the worst nostalgic is
the American who from his/her armchair longs for a constructed and prepackaged South Africa that is both progressive (because of its claim to have
“ended” apartheid) but also conservative in its metonymic use as an historical and timeless “Africa” drawn in traditional imperialist terms: wild,
strongly colored, and difficult to tame. Lombard accurately demonstrates
that the appeal to the American audience is specific to the historical moment
of the book’s publication, the Bush era, when liberal Americans were seeking to evade the kind of globalization that aimed at “greed, revenge, and
religious polarization.” Along with this dark globalization came a neoimperial understanding of war and the overall American fascination with
the frontier. One might argue also that “armchair-nostalgia” for a lost Africa
and South Africa provides American readers with a kind of comfort—
inviting them to explore a land supposedly different and distant from their
own, whose notorious racial relations allow them to construct South Africa
as the pinnacle of violence in order to absolve themselves of their own.
Two contemporary critiques of the public political and cultural spheres
in the Netherlands and Britain conclude the issue to show how nostalgia
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threatens European (attempts at) multiculturalism. Continuing the thread
of white innocence explored by Lombard, the essays by Saskia Pieterse and
Astrid Rasch explore the political present and the relationship between
contemporary national identity and the (mis)remembered imperial past.
Pieterse depicts the problematic relationship the Dutch have with their colonial past, describing how, since about the 1990s, Dutch politicians and cultural institutions have searched for new definitions of old schemes, formulas
that can somehow absolve Dutch colonialism from being colonial. Pieterse
rightly asks whether “commercialization, capitalism and modernization
were innocent undertakings.” The essay illustrates different challenges to a
clear/innocent imperial record as well as the relationship between economic
development and the emergence of nostalgia. For example, Pieterse cites an
exhibition on the Dutch golden age that fails to question slavery and instead
merely includes slaves along with spices as trade commodities that fueled
the mercantilist successes of eighteenth-century Holland. Pieterse effectively argues that the current nostalgia for a past Dutch splendor is also
anti-Muslim because of the longing for a dominantly white and Christian
nation.
Astrid Rasch’s exploration of British imperial memory closes the volume. Through a variety of sources that range from political speeches and
motion pictures to a historical monograph, Rasch shows how contemporary
nostalgia still revolves, as Rosaldo noted in 1989, “around a paradox.” Rasch’s
essay notes how “the celebration of empire does not happen in spite of but
through an engagement with the criticism of empire.” Both Pieterse and
Rasch use Paul Gilroy’s framework of “postcolonial melancholia” to shed
light on the kinds of divisive imperial memories that exclude the experience
of postcolonial European citizens. Salman Rushdie’s well-known description of imperial nostalgia is also useful here in discussing recent cinematographic renditions of empire in which colonizers, even when depicted in
negative terms, are still, in Rushdie’s words, “the agents of the story.” Rasch
shows us how Britain’s quest for a post-Brexit identity comes with a reelaboration of the empire through its commodification (the dominant present of political speeches and cultural artifacts) and a revisionist “truth”
about the benefits of imperial conquests. Rasch claims that parallel to the
emergence of postcolonial nostalgic products, public intellectuals search for
a meaning of the imperial past that aims to transcend political polarizations.
In moments of national crises of identity the left (anti-empire) and the right
(pro-empire) lose credibility. David Lean, for instance, whose 1984 version
of A Passage to India was one of the film’s prompting Rosaldo’s original formulations regarding imperial nostalgia, claimed his film portrayed an
understanding of empire that transcends leftist or rightist arbitrary interpretations. Similarly, the contemporary historian Nigel Ferguson declares
himself as a “brave fighter against the unthinking dogma.”
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In conclusion, this special issue shows how the present complicates the
modalities of nostalgia disrupting the linear directions Rosaldo described
in the late 1980s. One aspect that emerges here is that decolonization has
not taken a clear and straightforward path either in actual history or in
historiographical and literary representations thereof. The authors of this
volume seem to suggest that to this day the empire has a central and
foundational role in the independent nation-state that emerged through
anti-colonial struggle. Such influence is not only present in the immediate
historical moment of the proclamation of the new postcolonial entity but
continues as a permanent distorted mirror of the dialectics of empires. Such
conflicts or dialectics, the authors show, are present not only in the original
colony/mother land places but also elsewhere because the memory of empire
is powerful enough to create new configurations that transcend the original colonizer and colonized.
Works Cited
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2008.
Lindt, Naomi, “In Vietnam, Recreating French Roots. The New York Times.” 18
May 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/greathomesanddestinations
/19gh-vietnam.html. Accessed 10 September 2019.
Smith, David “‘Nostalgia is a Disease Many White Americans Have.’” Interview
with Lynn Nottage, The Guardian, 17 February 2016, https://www.theguardian
.com/stage/2016/feb/17/lynn-nottage-sweat-donald-trump-bernie-sanders.
Accessed 10 September 2019.
Rosaldo, Renato. Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Beacon Press,
1989.