Modernist literature at the end of the British empire challenges
conventional notions of homeland, heritage, and community.
Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by The Modernist Studies
Association
The waning British empire left behind an abundance of material relics
and an inventory of feelings not easily relinquished. In The Obsolete
Empire, Philip Tsang brings together an unusual constellation of
writers--Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul--to
trace an aesthetics of frustrated attachment that emerged in the wake of
imperial decline. Caught between an expansive Britishness and an
exclusive Englishness, these writers explored what it meant to belong to
an empire that did not belong to them.
Thanks to their voracious reading of English fiction and poetry in their
formative years, all of these writers experienced a richly textured
world with which they deeply identified but from which they felt
excluded. The literary England they imagined, frozen in time and out of
place with the realities of imperial decline, in turn figures in their
writings as a repository of unconsummated attachments, contradictory
desires, and belated exchanges. Their works arrest the linear
progression from colonial to postcolonial, from empire to nation, and
from subject to citizen. Drawing on a rich body of scholarship on affect
and temporality, Tsang demonstrates how the British empire endures as a
structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan.
By showing how literary reading sets in motion a tense interplay of
intimacy and exclusion, Tsang investigates a unique mode of belonging
arising from the predicament of being conscripted into a global empire
but not desired as its proper citizen. Ultimately, The Obsolete Empire
asks: What does it mean to be inside or outside any given culture? How
do large-scale geopolitical changes play out at the level of cultural
attachment and political belonging? How does literary reading establish
or unsettle narratives of who we are? These questions preoccupied
writers across Britain's former empire and continue to resonate today.
