The Postcolonial City and its Subjects

London, Nairobi, Bombay

Rashmi Varma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781138793767
• eBook ISBN: 9781136804021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book considers twentieth and twenty-first century literary and cultural formations of the postcolonial city and the constitution of new subjects within it. Varma offers a reading of both historical and contemporary debates on urbanism through the filter of postcolonial fictions and the cultural fields surrounding and containing them. In particular, she presents a representational history of London, Nairobi and Bombay in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and engages three key theoretical frameworks—the city within postcolonial theory and culture (its troubled salience in the construction of postcolonial public spheres and identities, from local, rural, ethnic/"tribal", and regional to "national", cosmopolitan and transnational subjects and spaces); postcolonial fictions as constituting a new world literary space and as a site of the articulation of contending narratives of urban space, global culture and postcolonial development; and postcolonial feminist citizenship as a universal political project challenging current neo-liberal and post neo-liberal contractions and eviscerations of public spaces and rights.

1 Eccentric Routes

London: Take One

Women in modernist literature by men appear via … illegitimate or eccentric routes.

—Janet Wolff, “Invisible Flaneuse”

After all, London was the capital of India.

—London Calling

I begin my study on postcolonial cities with a discussion of early-twentieth-century representations of London. The question that is likely to arise for most readers at the very outset would be: why should a feminist reading of postcolonial urbanism begin its itinerary in imperial London? This chapter will attempt to answer this question via different, if somewhat eccentric, routes.

I start by taking you to the opening scene of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway that provides one possible pathway into this question. In it, the novel’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged, upper-class woman married to an important politician, prepares to take a walk in London. As she sets out to soak in the wonder and the glory of imperial London (albeit in the aftermath of World War I), she is haunted by the specter of a time when London would be “a grass-grown path and all those hurrying along the pavement this Wednesday morning (would be) but bones.”¹ I underscore the word haunted to suggest another way of looking at modernism’s understanding of its “present”, proposing a spectral view of the postcolonial futures yet to come. From this perspective, we see that the idea of the death of imperial London, as figured by Woolf in the image of bones, preceded the historical demise of the imperial city. Clarissa Dalloway’s ruminations underscore the fact that even at the heart of the British Empire, intimations of its mortality, destruction and fragmentation were already present, later to be interminably re-iterated in the discursive thread that binds London as a city constantly engaged in processes of regeneration and re-invention.

In this opening scene, the time-space limit of the imperial city is refracted through Clarissa’s stream of consciousness that is both individual and part of a collective unconscious of modernity in the traumatic time of war. The imperial city is already the site of what is to be later theorized as its postcolonial melancholia, characterized by a pervasive sense of the irrecoverability of the lost object of Empire.² The still-to-come postcolonial city marks the imperial metropole’s internal limit, and becomes its phantasmatic, shadowy double. It contains what remains (bones) of the colonial city even as it is the site of the scattering of imperial significations assembled at home, such that the coming postcolonial city can be imagined worldwide.³ This projection into an unknown future of the city, I propose, offers us another way of not just looking at Woolf and her aesthetic unfolding of the modernist “present” but of London’s precarious modernity in the context of Britain’s imperial project. It is this ability of Woolf’s art to imagine, as Jacques Derrida wrote of the texts of Marx and Engels, its “own possible ‘ageing’ and (their) intrinsically irreducible historicity” that becomes the defining feature of its modernism.⁴ The mode of spectral presence evoked by the image of an emptied out city populated with bones apprehends the very destabilization of temporal and spatial co-ordinates that allows the Other to enter modernity as an apparition.⁵ In this scene from Mrs Dalloway Woolf projects the image of bones that might typically signify archaic time, the designated time of the Other, into the future, as a time that is yet to come, that is “not yet there”.⁶ The image of the evacuated imperial city is thus a dialectical one, in Benjaminian terms, as it allows for a theorization of the relationship between the archaic and the modern, between the local and the global. Thus I use the moment from Woolf’s text that I refer above to make visible the trace of the idea of the postcolonial city within the high imperial metropole.

Of course metaphors of death and regeneration have been integral to progressivist urban sociology and other related social sciences that envisioned the evolutionary cycle of urban growth as movement from the countryside to city, and from urban conurbation to megalopolis, culminating in the proverbial necropolis of a shadowy and ultimately destructive modernity. Lewis Mumford wrote of this “cycle” as descriptive of “the course of all the historic metropolises, including those that arose again out of their own ruins and graveyards.”⁷ This chapter attempts to trouble the progressivist narratives of urbanism that secured London’s place at the center of global imaginations of modernity by offering other readings of imperial London that are nevertheless coeval with representations of a hegemonic imperial metropolitanism. At the core of the British imperial project, London was translated, even in the literal sense of being borne across, in the Empire’s margins, only to create new and sometimes unexpected narratives and logics of centralities and peripheries.

Narratives of imperial subjectivity, as in Woolf, are inseparably linked to the material vagaries of colonial capitalism and the uneven forms of metropolitan rule that it generated. The re-iterative discourse of London’s enduring vitality has been constantly mediated by the presence of new bodies and subjects that came to inhabit, albeit surreptitiously, what were the hegemonic representations of the city. If modernist urbanism tended to abstract urban space such that, as David L. Pike puts it, the human itself constituted a “spectre of irrationality”, attention to these bodies and subjects helps us re-frame some of the central assumptions of political agency and citizenship, especially in gendered terms, within the modernist city.⁸

While placing the modernist city in the context of a world (imperial, capitalist) system, the arguments in this chapter are constructed around embodiment and transnationality (both products of the historical processes unleashed by colonial capitalism but occluded within world system theories), or around what postmodern thinking in a less materialist way has called “difference”. Such a reading challenges the uneven universality of global citizenship that purports to transcend local, national and regional spheres of belonging and to supersede abstract and embodied differences. Rather, the chapter re-articulates the possibilities of a universal feminist project of citizenship with a materialist critique of capitalist modernity and the aesthetic forms it generates. The citizen (when male, white, propertied), whose body is largely immaterial, is placed alongside different subjects of politics such as this book’s “unhomely women”. Whereas modernism’s aestheticized abstraction of urban space that rendered it coherent, homogeneous and exchangeable glossed over the messy terrain of everyday life in the city and its embedded inequalities, the figure of unhomely women in all its unruliness and ir-rationality disrupts the process of abstraction, loss of coherence, and the easy assumption of groundless universalism.

The Whole Empire in Little

Whereas the scene from Woolf’s novel opens up the pathway between an interiorized subjectivity and a worldly consciousness, the British Empire exhibition of 1924 provided Londoners in general with a powerful sense of the world that was encased in their city. The cognitive leap of faith in apprehending the contradictory scale of the world contained in the city is dramatized very effectively in Andrea Levy’s novel A Small Island (2004). In the Prologue, the young Queenie (daughter of a provincial butcher), one of the four protagonists in the novel, describes the experience of going to the Exhibition:

The year we went to the Empire Exhibition, the Great War was not long over but nearly forgotten. Even Father agreed that the Empire Exhibition sounded like it was worth a look. The King had described it as “the whole Empire in little”. Mother thought that meant it was a miniature, like a toy railway or model village. Until someone told her that they’d seen the real lifesize Stephenson’s Rocket on display. “It must be as big as the whole world,” I said, which made everybody laugh.⁹

What stands out in this passage is the idea of the overlapping and contending scales of the imperial city and of the world it had colonized. Can the city contain the world in miniature, or is the city a miniature version of the world? The process of miniaturization involves producing an exact replica, but scaled down. It thus allows the world to be contained in the city, even as the city, in miniature form, represents the world. Within the space of the exhibition miniaturization as a mode of representation is directly linked to the social relations produced by capitalism, in which the commodity (coffee, tea, chocolate, machines, crafts) stands in for and indeed congeals whole networks of historical and cultural difference and economic relations.

The over-wrought pre-eminence of London as the “metropolis” that stood against all the negative (backward, non-modern) associations of the “colony” was indicative of how the capital city encapsulated in the early decades of the twentieth century both the glory and the changing status of the British Empire. Malcolm Bradbury notes that by the end of the nineteenth century, rapid industrialization, technological growth and urbanization had made London the world’s biggest city and Europe’s commercial center.¹⁰ Although London’s significance as a major center of modernist artistic output and avant-garde cultural practice remained uncertain and was consistently out-flanked by Europe’s other capitals like Paris and Berlin, there is little doubt that on the eve of World War I London had succeeded in establishing an artistic reputation as well, albeit a more politically conservative one than that of continental Europe.¹¹ The idea of London as the acme of modern culture and international commerce in general, combined with a distinct national identity predicated on its global reach through Empire, was a powerful one especially in the colonies, translated and transmitted in the cultural work done by English administrators, planners, missionaries, social workers, writers and educators.¹² London thus played a central role in creating empire in its image, even as its institutions—commercial, political and cultural—carried on the realpolitik of governing almost a quarter of the earth’s surface, a task increasingly difficult and often unwieldy by the time of World War II.¹³

In the account that I offer below I take as implicit broad continuities between late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century renditions of urban space in literature, culture, policy and politics, even as I seek to highlight the ways in which the twentieth-century city represented some radical discontinuities of experience and representation from the preceding century.¹⁴ The multiplicity of European modernisms emanating from different cultural contexts and geographical locations, and articulating varied political agendas and aesthetic forms, also needs to be meticulously taken into account. But these differences do not obviate the singular effect of metropolitan power on the global scale.¹⁵ Therefore, while focusing on the modernist city of London, the discussion draws upon the often very similar assumptions shared by different geographical contexts of modernisms.¹⁶

The material conditions of colonialism and industrial capitalism that shaped London’s contours as well as of those other European metropoles in the early decades of the twentieth century found shape in what I call the “standard urban narratives” of modernism. These narratives describe not only the features of the modern city; they also prescribe the city’s role as central within various national cultures. A generalization such as “standard urban narratives” is not meant to erase the presence of other competing narratives on and of the city (as found in popular culture, and in the writings by women, working-class, gay, lesbian and black artists), nor of varied modernist practices and philosophies. Rather, it is deployed to enable the disclosure of where and how these oppositional narratives pressed against the imaginative and political limits of the “standard urban narratives” of modernism. In this my analysis is aligned with recent readings of “postcolonial London” that represent the city’s imperial history as always complex and conflicted, pitting those multiple histories against the “totalizing and abstract concept of the ‘colonial centre’”.¹⁷

As we read the city’s contours and fault-lines in these standard urban narratives, London expresses not just the prevailing imperial, class and gender arrangements during and in the aftermath of World War I, but evokes modernity’s rationalization of space, in its configuration of public and private realms, of legal and affective spaces of citizenship and belonging, and of the demarcation of the spaces and temporalities of production and consumption. The imperial city came to signify what Daniel Bell calls “the ‘rational cosmology’ that underlay the bourgeois world view of an ordered relation between space and time”.¹⁸ This ‘rational cosmology’ found further vigorous expression in ideas of civic order and political regulation. The need to manage territorial possessions from a center, to control the growing domestic population in the city, and the resultant unruliness of London’s urban sprawl legitimated the rise of new forms of knowledge such as social reform, cartography and urban planning; created novel regimes of policing and surveillance; and produced persuasive discourses on hygiene, sanitation, civic self-fashioning and improvement, and the ideology of a proper ordering of the home and the world.

But of course London’s “internal order” was inextricably linked to its “imperial fortunes”, even as Richard Sennett suggests, “this unimaginably wealthy place had placated … its poor with the spoils of conquest”.¹⁹ Studies of London’s spatial arrangements in the early part of the twentieth century reveal that although the colonial spoils were not distributed equally across class divisions, the illusory possibility of their acquisition by any Briton was inscribed in spatial divisions of “class-homogeneous, disconnected spaces” that served to both contain desires of upward mobility and to inscribe those desires into the very fabric of the city.²⁰ These new arrangements of capital and property in London were meant to indicate social stability, making the separation and insulation of “the relentless continuity of (London’s) ceremonial fabric” from “equally vast scenes elsewhere in London of poverty and social distress” seem natural or at least the inevitable end result of capitalist development.²¹

In particular, the East End of London (an area that was “discovered” by social investigators and named as such in the 1880s) provided observers with simultaneously intriguing and repellent scenes of poverty and chaos that needed to be kept at a distance from the core of the imperial city.²² As London’s population grew, so did the number of social observers who deployed methods borrowed from scientific empiricism and colonial ethnography in order to both rationalize London’s class-divided spaces and to provide a unifying narrative for the growing city.²³ The presence of the poor signaled the risks of contagion and death, a slide into the abyss of disease and poverty, and a loss of imperial metropolitan power. The working classes and the poor immigrants who inhabited the marginal spaces of the city were widely pathologized as evil and degenerate in the middle-class imagination. To admit these “outcast” city dwellers as proper residents of the city would have amounted to recognizing the rot of civilization within the imperial metropolis.²⁴

Interestingly, descriptions of the London poor in the East End borrowed key notions of social difference from the ever-expanding repertoire of colonial discourse. Ian Baucom writes of how the London poor came to function as “local allegories of the empire’s distant ‘savages’”.²⁵ Slum quarters were perceived as “a zone of cultural primitivism and racial alterity”.²⁶ From parliamentary reports to censuses, surveys and urban plans, colonial discourse drew an analogy between the untamed savages on the frontiers of the British Empire with those within it, eating away at the metropolitan center’s civilizational fabric.²⁷ An impending fear of nihilism was displaced on to “darkest” East End pitted against the “blaze of light” that was the imperial capital.²⁸ Recall the discussion in the Int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Permissions
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Postcolonial Itinerary
• 1. Eccentric Routes
• 2. Different Belongings
• 3. Uncivil Lines
• 4. Conclusion: Situated Solidarities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index