BOOK REVIEW: Simon Gikandi.MAPS OF ENGLISHNESS: WRITING IDENTITY IN THE CULTURE OF COLONIALISM. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.

Abstract

The preface to Maps of Englishness recalls two questions that began to trouble the author as a graduate student in Edinburgh in the early 1980s: "Why did formerly colonized people, many of whom had spent generations fighting against colonial domination, seem to invest so much in cultural institutions [. . .] that were closely associated with imperial conquest and rule? And why was it that here in Great Britain [. . .] the nature and destiny of the country were being discussed in terms previously reserved for the former colonies [crisis of national identity, underdevelopment, creating usable pasts]?" (ix). Gikandi has arrived at answers that insist on the linkage of these issues. Most succinctly, he argues that "in terms of consciousness, ideology, and even language, the imperial experience invented a referent (empire) and a culture (that of colonialism) that became the conditions of possibility for metropolitan and colonial subjects and cultures alike" (191). Moreover, Gikandi insists that "colonialism is an incomplete project" (9). Among the formerly colonized, emulation of the values and institutions of modernity, especially those of bourgeois society, perpetuate colonialism's cultural categories outside the historical circumstances that produced them (32); in the metropolitan center, the unacknowledged role of colonialism in the construction of Englishness precipitates the crises of national identity and moral panics about race that have marked Britain's late twentieth-century history (xvi). In support of these central claims, Maps of Englishness engages in five wide-ranging and thoroughly researched studies of the culture of colonialism, from the 1865 debate between Carlyle and Mill on Governor Eyre's conduct in Morant Bay, Jamaica, to the dilemmas posed in and by The Satanic Verses. Indeed, one of the achievements of this study is its synthesis and extension of many contemporary arguments about colonial and postcolonial texts and cultural controversies.

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