Postcolonialism Revisited

Writing Wales in English

Kirsti Bohata

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781783163557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

1

Theoretical Contexts

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South.

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture¹

Postcolonial perspectives emerge, Homi Bhabha declares in the quotation above, from the colonial testimony of ‘Third World countries’. Bhabha’s use of terminology such as ‘Third World’ and especially his references to geopolitical binaries of East and West, North and South now seem dated. Within the mainstream of postcolonial studies these simplistic categories have long since been challenged. Furthermore, from wherever postcolonial perspectives first emerged they have been quickly recognized, and postcolonial theory embraced, in quarters that have sometimes surprised and even angered ‘orthodox’ postcolonialists. But if the second part of Bhabha’s quotation highlights how far postcolonial studies have travelled in the past decade, then the first sentence (which places an examination of the ‘unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation’ at the centre of postcolonialism) is testimony to the enduring and pressing relevance of such perspectives today.

What postcolonialism offers, in addition to a collection of complex theoretical tools, is a network of thematic concerns to which post-colonial writers return again and again. These are often bound up with specific anti-colonial struggles, the articulation of structures of domination (internal and external), the decolonization of the mind (to use Ngugi’s phrase), and so on. In its engagement with cultural, geographical, political, gendered, sexual and temporal specificities, postcolonial writing (be it creative, academic or political) may be read as forming complex discourses which deconstruct and reimagine personal, cultural and national identities. The wide appeal of postcolonialism is surely due in no small part to this concern with shifting identity, with ‘re-membering’ the self, and is of immediate relevance to and for a nation such as Wales, which has relied in recent centuries on a fairly self-conscious imagining of nation. It is therefore not surprising that the concerns of postcolonial writers and theorists from elsewhere chime so resonantly with the concerns of a significant number of writers from Wales. Before going on to engage with some examples of Welsh writing in English more closely, this chapter offers a brief introduction to some of the ways in which we might approach the notion of a ‘postcolonial’ Wales and offers some preliminary observations on the way the Welsh ‘model’ might be seen to challenge some postcolonial orthodoxies.

Postcolonialism refers, primarily, to the study of colonial/post-colonial (that is, post-independence)² situations. Postcolonial studies encompass history, economics, colonial and imperial discourses, the condition of colonized peoples, strategies of decolonization, and so on; literary criticism directly engaged with post-colonial writing in any language, but most commonly in a European language; and revisionist projects which force a reassessment of the literature of colonialism and the metropolitan ‘centre’. The term ‘postcolonialism’ itself has been viewed as problematic, not least since it suggests that colonialism is over, thus ignoring ‘neo-colonialism’. R. Shome has argued that, in the context of academic investigations, ‘the prefix “post” does not mean a final closure, nor does it announce the “end” of that to which it is appended; rather it suggests a thinking through and beyond the problematics of that to which it is appended’.³ Anne McClintock has famously attacked the tendency of the term to universalize a single colonial/post-colonial condition, thereby replicating the binary between colonizer and colonial other;⁴ she thus draws attention to the problem of the prefix ‘post’, which suggests an adherence to the very idea of progressive linearity that postcolonial theory has tried to undermine. The problems of any such postcolonial model are evident in the case of Wales, whose history and literature in no way conform to the progressive-linear model of moving from colonization (and colonial literature) to decolonization (and postcolonial literature).

The unhyphenated term ‘postcolonialism’ is used here to refer to a broad field of academic research, literary theory and creative writing, as well as in an attempt to distance it from any temporal or political implication that colonialism is ended and to emphasize the word’s reference to a definable field of academic study; its inadequacy, however, is glaring. The label has become so all encompassing that under its umbrella the politico-historical and sociocultural situations to which it is applied range into paradox. If settler colonies are ‘post-colonial’, what are the native ‘First Nations’ of these same territories? Once an imperial and colonial overlord, surely Britain is in some sense ‘post-colonial’ too, and what about the case of North America? How does colonial or post-independence India compare with South Africa? This is not to suggest that the experiences of settler colonies or former imperial powers are not usefully explored within postcolonial studies, or that comparative studies of diverse geo-historical entities are not productive, but rather to demonstrate that there is no possibility of talking in terms of ‘the’ colonial, post-colonial or even ‘postcolonial’ model, against which Wales should be measured in order to determine the validity of adopting and adapting postcolonial paradigms in the study of its history or literature. The sheer diversity of ethnicities, places and literatures which might be addressed through postcolonial paradigms means that, while the term may serve as a shorthand to refer to the academic discourses which engage with or make use of postcolonial theory, the subdivision (and perhaps renaming) of the field(s) is long overdue. Within such subdivision there is most certainly space for the use and expansion of postcolonial theory in the context of those countries not normally recognized as colonial or post-colonial. These are countries whose early histories include conquest and colonization prior to the period traditionally addressed by postcolonialism, and whose subjugation or marginalization may indeed continue right through and beyond the eras of overseas mercantilism, colonization and imperialism. In these cases we find a long history of cultural assimilation and/or political co-option, yet also a persistent, self-defined sense of cultural difference and, later, of nationhood. Countries such as Wales and Ireland spring to mind, but outside the British Empire, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, along with other ethnicities and nations of the former Habsburg Empire, for instance, might also be productively examined in this category.⁵ The results of ongoing and new studies should complicate our understandings of regions and cultures too often glossed over and dismissed as ‘western’ or ‘white’ or ‘first world’, and demand a reappraisal of certain postcolonial positionings.

If reading Anglophone Welsh writing in the light of postcolonial paradigms may be contentious within the field of Welsh writing in English, making a space for Wales in postcolonial studies is itself not without difficulties. The authors of The Empire Writes Back (1989), an early, seminal survey of postcolonialism, suggest that the ‘complicity [of Wales and Scotland] in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial’.⁶ Disqualification on the grounds of complicity and the concomitant valorization of a form of victimology have, however, been questioned by more sophisticated readings of colonization and imperialism. Yet something of this attitude persists, and Ken Goodwin has attacked the hierarchical victimology permeating some areas of postcolonialism:

There is a sense in which the theory of postcoloniality ought to encourage the view that we are all colonial, imperialist, and postcolonial in various proportions. It generally doesn’t however. It tends more towards the view that my postcoloniality is more suffused with suffering and unfairness than yours; it is a species of victimology.⁷

If Wales has been regarded by some as an inseparable part of the imperial metropole of the British Empire, as suggested by Ashcroft et al., then at the other extreme there are those who have sought to deny any Welsh involvement in the so-called British Empire. Working from the position that Wales was England’s first colony, and that Wales has since been subject to political, economic and cultural imperialism, Wales is exonerated from involvement in the British Empire, its moral purity intact, by the assertion that any manifestations of imperialist tendencies in Wales were necessarily manifestations of Anglicization – and therefore not actually Welsh at all. This view has been articulated by Ned Thomas in The Welsh Extremist (1971) (although it should be noted that, elsewhere, Thomas offers much more sophisticated and subtle discussions of a ‘postcolonial’ Wales).

I am not exonerating Welshmen from having participated in British imperialism. It is merely that when they did so they did so as Britishers, not as Welshmen. The Welsh language was not part of that imperialism, and as Welsh speakers in their own country the Welsh were themselves the victim of a kind of imperialism.⁸

Appealing though this proposition may be, it is entirely inadequate and thoroughly misleading. Ned Thomas’s statement makes a convenient but flawed and simplistic division between ‘Welshmen’ and ‘Britishers’, which ignores Welsh involvement in imperial missionary work throughout the Empire (a role which was, indeed, visualized as something that only the uniquely moral Welsh might fulfil, a project closely followed in the Welsh-language press), as well as Welsh colonization of Patagonia, not to mention of North America, Australia, and so on.⁹ It is neither helpful nor acceptable to divide desirable and undesirable attitudes to imperialism into Welsh and British (read English) perspectives respectively, nor do such divisions aid our understanding of the complex experience of Welsh-British-English hybridity. Yet, the fact remains that the position of Wales within the British Empire and the United Kingdom was not, and is not, coterminous with that of England. In Wales we may find that the proportions in which we have been and are colonial, imperialist and post-colonial, to paraphrase Goodwin, are subtly and sometimes significantly different from those of other countries of the UK and the rest of Empire.

The categories of colonizer and colonized are, of course, far more complex than the simple binary suggested by these two labels might suggest. As the present study argues, the case of Wales is an excellent example of how postcolonial paradigms may be employed, as Goodwin suggests, to reveal the ways in which the Welsh have been subjected to a form of imperialism over a long period of time, while also acknowledging the way the Welsh have been complicit in their own subjugation and in the colonization of others.¹⁰ Over-reliance on simplistic, if convenient, binaries is at the root of some of the principal objections which might be raised in the use of postcolonial theory in a Welsh context, such as the binary between (Christian) Europe and the rest of the world, which seems to be inherent in the vast majority of postcolonial studies. Said and others have been criticized for their reliance on binary categories, yet that between a grossly simplified and homogenized Europe (or the west) and other parts of the world remains a persistent one, and many postcolonial discussions thus ironically ‘orientalize’ Europe, and especially Britain, even as they aim to deconstruct such discourses in former colonies. Indeed, in many postcolonial studies, the existence of Wales is elided altogether. It is not unusual for England and Britain to be used interchangeably in postcolonial studies – ‘England’ is even described as a ‘nation-state’ in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts – and while this slip is a common one, it is none the less significant.¹¹

Infuriating though it is when ‘England’ is used to refer to Britain, or even the whole United Kingdom (with its resulting effacement of Wales, Scotland and, in different periods, Ireland or Northern Ireland), Robert Young points out that this usage is also a fairly accurate expression of the Anglocentricity of Britain. The studied use of the word ‘Britain’ may in fact, he argues, work to obscure Anglocentric hegemony rather than to expose or undermine it.

British [is] a cunning word of apparent political correctness invoked in order to mask the metonymic extension of English dominance over the other kingdoms with which England has constructed illicit acts of union, countries that now survive in the international arena only in the realm of football and rugby. The dutiful use of the term ‘British’ rather than ‘English’, as Gargi Bhattacharya observes, misses the point that in terms of power relations there is no difference between them: ‘British’ is the name imposed by the English on the non-English.¹²

The postcolonial idea that ‘British’ is a misleading label that disguises English cultural hegemony and a project of assimilation is a very interesting one, and was raised by J. R. Jones in Prydeindod (1966), where he emphasized the importance of understanding Britishness as an ideology. Dewi Z. Phillips explains that, according to Jones, the ideology of Britishness ‘tempts the Welsh to believe they can participate on equal terms within the framework of Britishness, and yet they are also aware of the unreality of this hope’.¹³ This awareness in turn, Jones argues, causes much of the tension and bitterness found in Wales.

These points, however, need not necessarily undermine an attempt to decentre the Anglocentricity of Britain – to give the island and its peoples their ‘proper names’, to recall Seamus Heaney’s poem.¹⁴ Britain is a slippery – and versatile – appellation that is invested with a variety of meanings.¹⁵ ‘British’ may well be a label ‘imposed’ on the non-English by the English, but it is also one chosen by those wishing to claim they belong to the island without identifying themselves as English, or for that matter as Welsh, Scottish or Irish. It is also an identity that is claimed in addition to these identities. Extricating Britain from hegemonic Anglocentricity is part of a larger project which, in postcolonial terms, might be described as the ‘dehomogenization of whiteness’, where the category of ‘Europe’ constructed by postcolonial discourses is enlarged and complicated, a project to which this book contributes.¹⁶ In this book, every effort is made to use ‘Britain’ to refer to the island only, although ‘British’ refers to all citizens of the United Kingdom. The meaning of ‘Britishness’, where this is used, should be clear from the context, although this is inescapably a shifting and relational term.

The proximity of Wales to England, their geographic union within the island of Britain, is another factor in the reluctance of some to consider Wales in postcolonial terms. Definitions of a colony often place considerable emphasis on distance between colony and mother country. Indeed, the distinction between colonization and ‘national’ expansionism and annexation generally relies upon whether or not there is a sea separating the two territories. According to this argument, Ireland was colonized by the Anglo-Normans (later the English and British), while Wales was conquered and as...