Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial PressJulie F. Codell, ed.
Book Review
In recent years various disciplines have seen a reconsideration of the traditionally conceived relationship between centre and periphery, metropole and colony. The twelve essays that make up this collection are connected through an exploration of the Victorian press at home and abroad — which includes newspapers, specialist publications, and periodicals such as the Journal of Indian Art and History — as a medium which similarly undermines such binary formulations. Central to the project as a whole is the notion that the press of the British colonial era functioned as an intersection for national and imperial discourses, and as a result created a series of identities — Saidian ‘co-histories’ — formed through the way in which Britain and the colonies ‘textually constituted themselves and each other with and against each other and in each other’s constant presence, real or imagined’ (Introduction, p. 18). Thus, as editor Julia F. Codell suggests in her perceptive introduction, the press was a multi-vocal space that allowed pivotal issues of power, policy, religion, and history, from the local to the international, to be addressed from a variety of angles. In this way it might function as an agent of change as well as of colonial surveillance arid domination. This scope is reflected in the focus of the essays brought together in this collection, which ranges from Telegraphic News Agencies to Welsh Missionary journalism; from Blackwood’s Magazine to the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. Codell gives structure to this diversity by breaking the book into two equal halves. The first, ‘Sites of Authority: Imperial Domination and Press Intervention’, examines the role played by the press in the binding of the ‘native identity’ to British colonial authority; while the second, ‘Sites of Fracture: Resistance and Autonomy in Imperial Representation’, explores the ‘split identities’ characteristic of colonialism and how the periodical press in particular was able to articulate such identities in relation to wider notions of Empire. Within the first, David Finke ‘Imperial Self-Representation: Constructions of Empire in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1880—l900’ is a fascinating investigation of the association between this influential magazine and the Indian Civil Service and the impact such a connection has upon the versions of Empire found within its pages. Equally significant are the discussions of Britishness in essays by J. Lee Thompson and Dorothy O. Helly and Helen Callaway, the former charting the influence of the Imperial Press Conference of 1909 upon colonial responses to the events of 1914, and the latter co-authored piece exploring the creation of a patriotic British identity in journalism concerning South Africa in the 1890s and the events leading up to the Boer war. In the second section, Julie Codell’s examination of a remarkable and complex body of Indian colonial writing in the mainstream British press in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is a timely addition to the field, particularly in terms of Orientalism, a work whose influence reverberates through this volume. The final essay is also concerned with such issues, but here Douglas Peers studies J. W. Kaye’s militaristic narratives of Empire and imperial heroes morally and religiously pure men who are carefully and deliberately defined apart from those Indians and Anglo-Indians who inevitably fell short of his ideal. Consistently impressive, this collection of essays is an important multi-disciplinary contribution to Anglo-Indian colonial studies as well as to notions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Imperial globalism and the formation of national identities. Perhaps inevitably, there is an occasional unwillingness to coherently confront the broader implications for these fields of some of the arguments made here, yet in the final analysis the richness and diversity of this material is its strength. -- Matthew Dimmock, University of Sussex, YES, 35, 2005 To see a full description of this book, search our online database
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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001