Bill Schwarz

Memory : Histories, Theories, Debates

Memory has never been closer to us, yet never more difficult to understand. In the more than thirty specially commissioned essays that make up this book, leading scholars survey the histories, the theories, and the faultlines that compose the field of memory research.The volume reconstructs the work of the great philosophical and literary figures of the last two centuries who recast the concept of memory and brought it into the forefront of the modernist and postmodernist imagination-among them, Bergson, Halbwachs, Freud, Proust, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. Drawing on recent advances in the sciences and in the humanities, the contributors address thequestion of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.The public, political life of memory is an increasingly urgent issue in the societies we now inhabit, while the category of memory itself seems to become ever more capacious.Asking how we might think about the politics of memory, the closing chapters explore anumber of defining instances in which the troubled phenomenon of memory has entered and reshaped our very conception of what makes and drives the domain of politics. These include issues of slavery, the Soviet experience, the Holocaust, feminism and recovered memory, and memory in post-apartheid South Africa.

An Unsentimental Education. John Darwin's Empire

In the autumn of 2012 I found myself—unusually these days—in a bookshop, where I saw arrayed on the counter for new books copies of John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire. The Global Expansion of Britain. At almost 500 pages it’s not a slim volume. My heart dropped, for I realised its arrival was about to bring my way an unanticipated helping of hard, surplus labour. I had just spent more time than I care to recall trying to get my head around Darwin’s After Tamerlane. The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (first published in 2007) and, having accomplished that, I then had to set to work on his The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (which appeared in 2009). Neither of these books is short: After Tamerlane comes in at just under 600 pages and The Empire Project at precisely 800. They both range far and wide and although written in accommodating prose, they require close attention, for they exhibit astonishing, incisive syntheses of long and complex historical processes, some of which took me to completely unknown territory. Until a while back Darwin hadn’t possessed a reputation as a conspicuously prodigious author, which made my sighting of the newly minted Unfinished Empire all the more of a shock, coming so quickly after the appearance of the two big books. In 1981, he had published a conventional monograph, Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918–1922. Seven years later, came Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World, which first gave an indication of Darwin’s powers of grand historical explanation, to be followed a little later by a more explicitly pedagogic intervention, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (1991). There followed a lull of some 16 years until After Tamerlane, although we can assume, in the light of the rate of publication of the past while, that he had nonetheless been keeping himself busy. When it was The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2015 Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 125–144, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2015.997118

The Fact of Whiteness: Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing – a Historian’s Notebook

In an oblique homage to Frantz Fanon, this article is a cultural historian’s reading of Doris Lessing’s famous 1950 novel, The Grass is Singing. I approach it as an engaging and sophisticated exploration of gendered racial whiteness, manifest in the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia towards the end of colonial rule. I suggest that central to Lessing’s novelistic project is a thinking through of how it might be possible to envisage ‘knowledge’ (truth) if it were to be freed from ‘race’. Arguably, the novel is a fictional embodiment of the thesis that the dismantling of racial whiteness provides the precondition for new thought to happen, both in an epistemological and ethical sense. Deliberately open-ended, and taking as its starting point Lessing’s narrative procedure in the opening pages, the article situates ‘knowledge’ in relation to the emotions and psychic life of characters. In opposition to the imperatives of instrumental reason, The Grass is Singing arguably champions an ethics of ‘principled unknowability’, in which the location of the unconscious is never far away, and the Manichaean certainties of colonial-era whiteness are revealed as pathologically overdetermined.

C. L. R. James's American Civilization

Here I locate the intellectual positions which underwrote C. L. R. Jamess mammoth American Civilization, arguing that it is the close conceptual precursor of Jamess more well-known and celebrated study of English civilization, Beyond a Boundary. To understand these Atlantic, or black Atlantic, locations which inform Beyond a Boundary we can begin to discern the degree that this latter text, putatively Jamess most “English” of books, carries unseen within it the larger imprint of America and the wider Atlantic world.

After Decolonization, After Civil Rights: Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin

The escalation of systematic, if random, violence in the contemporary world frames the concerns of the article, which seeks to read Baldwin for the present. It works by a measure of indirection, arriving at Baldwin after a detour which introduces Chinua Achebe. The Baldwin–Achebe relationship is familiar fare. However, here I explore not the shared congruence between their first novels, but rather focus on their later works, in which the reflexes of terror lie close to the surface. I use Achebe’s final novel, Anthills of the Savanah , as a way into Baldwin’s “difficult” last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen , suggesting that both these works can speak directly to our own historical present. Both Baldwin and Achebe, I argue, chose to assume the role of witness to the evolving manifestations of catastrophe, which they came to believe enveloped the final years of their lives. In order to seek redemption they each determined to craft a prose—the product of a very particular historical conjuncture—which could bring out into the open the prevailing undercurrents of violence and terror.

The Strange Creolisation of Anglophone Caribbean Letters

There is a generation of anglophone Caribbean writers who came of age in the wake of the labour rebellions which swept across the region in the 1930s. They had in their sights the coming of independence and universal suffrage, and it was within this collective imaginary / democratic in its deepest reflexes / that the modern idea of Caribbean sovereignty first coalesced. The connection between the political struggle of the thirties and the imaginative literature which followed is complex. But decisive to both was the shared experience of discovering a popular voice which could operate in public life, taking the form of the vernacular speech of the nation-language. The story is made yet more complex by the fact that the literary formation which emerged largely did so outside the geographical Caribbean, in the metropole of England. After the labour rebellions of the 1930s, an entire generation felt itself compelled to escape the confines of colonial subordination in which, as West Indians, they could only function as variants of the empire’s natives, and endeavoured to cross the seas and head for lands where modern life seemed to work at the fullest pitch. From the 1940s onwards, Caribbean migrants carried with them the dream of ceasing to be a native and of becoming a properly modern person, able to take control of their own destinies and to fashion themselves as practitioners of a shared future. Prominent amongst this generation were many aspiring writers, fleeing societies in which the figure of ‘the writer’ had been all but unimaginable. There were precious few material means by which a writer, or a potential writer, could realise himself or herself as an authentic, socially recognised literary author. And yet, given the school curriculum, many West Indian children were inculcated into the mysteries of English literature. They had read the canon and learned how to decode the arcane sensibilities which gave it life. They came to understand that ‘daffodil’, a noun which had no resonance in the West Indies, represented a term appropriate for literary invocation, heavy with accreted meaning, whilst ‘breadfruit’, a staple of Caribbean life, did not. The education system produced a mass of young adults for whom the tenets of Matthew Arnold were powerful, but for whom the Caribbean offered no outlet. Reverence for England, as the accredited locale where literature happened, ran deep. As the Barbadian poet, Kamau Brathwaite, recalls, when he docked in Southampton in the 1950s on his way to Cambridge, he had entertained the fantasy that William Shakespeare himself would be on the quayside to welcome him, arms wide open, ready for the embrace. As it happened, Shakespeare and his embrace remained absent for Brathwaite as it did for most other migrants of his generation. Actually, existing England, as opposed to the imaginary England they had been introduced to at school, proved profoundly unhomely to the newcomers. The struggle to create England as a home proved a protracted, unfinished process which was only made possible as a result of the slow transformation of England itself */ a history which has in part been reconstituted in the emergent Caribbean fiction of the postwar period. This process of the creolisation of England has had many different aspects. Part of this story turns on the BBC and the World Service. That Caribbean letters should have become creolised in England remains an unexpected, strange paradox; that the BBC, an institution devoted to imperial rectitude, should have worked as a displaced home where this creolisation was publicly nurtured, was yet more shocking. And, most bewildering of all, as the Caribbean outpost of the Empire Service (the forerunner of the World Service) came to be, in part, more authentically Caribbean / more creolised / so too, by a curious sleight of hand, did a little corner of England. The Empire Service had been launched in December 1932, its principal cadres won to the cause by the conviction that the Service would function as a constitutive instrument of empire. Bill Schwarz