Out of place : Englishness, empire, and the locations of identity / Ian Baucom.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baucom, Ian, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

National characteristics, English, in literature.

Commonwealth literature (English)--History and criticism.

Commonwealth literature (English).

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Group identity in literature.

Decolonization in literature.

Imperialism in literature.

Colonies in literature.

Race in literature.

Great Britain--Colonies--History.

Great Britain.

England--Civilization.

England.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (260 p.)

Edition:

Core Textbook

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1999.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In a 1968 speech on British immigration policy, Enoch Powell insisted that although a black man may be a British citizen, he can never be an Englishman. This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. Ian Baucom reveals how "Englishness" emerged against the institutions and experiences of the British Empire, rendering English culture subject to local determinations and global negotiations. In his view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity. Analyzing imperial crisis zones--including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981--Baucom asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. To answer this question, he draws on a surprising range of sources: Victorian and imperial architectural theory, colonial tourist manuals, lexicographic treatises, domestic and imperial cricket culture, country house fetishism, and the writings of Ruskin, Kipling, Ford Maddox Ford, Forster, Rhys, C.L.R. James, Naipaul, and Rushdie--and representations of urban riot on television, in novels, and in parliamentary sessions. Emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some crucial locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition: the Morant Bay courthouse, Bombay's Gothic railway station, the battle grounds of the 1857 uprising in India, colonial cricket fields, and, last but not least, urban riot zones.

Contents:

Introduction: Locating English Identity

Ch. 1. The House of Memory: John Ruskin and the Architecture of Englishness

Ch. 2. "British to the Backbone": On Imperial Subject-Fashioning

Ch. 3. The Path from War to Friendship: E.M. Forster's Mutiny Pilgrimage

Ch. 4. Put a Little English on It: C.L.R. James and England's Field of Play

Ch. 5. Among the Ruins: Topographies of Postimperial Melancholy

Ch. 6. The Riot of Englishness: Migrancy, Nomadism, and the Redemption of the Nation

Afterword: Something Rich and Strange.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-243) and index.

ISBN:

9786612753695

9781400800438

1400800439

9781282753693

128275369X

9781400823031

140082303X

OCLC:

705527068