Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity

by Ian Baucom

Overview

In a 1968 speech on British immigration policy, Enoch Powell insisted that although a black man may be a British citizen, he can never be an Englishman. This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. Ian Baucom reveals how "Englishness" emerged against the institutions and experiences of the British Empire, rendering English culture subject to local determinations and global negotiations. In his view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity.


Analyzing imperial crisis zones--including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981--Baucom asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. To answer this question, he draws on a surprising range of sources: Victorian and imperial architectural theory, colonial tourist manuals, lexicographic treatises, domestic and imperial cricket culture, country house fetishism, and the writings of Ruskin, Kipling, Ford Maddox Ford, Forster, Rhys, C.L.R. James, Naipaul, and Rushdie--and representations of urban riot on television, in novels, and in parliamentary sessions. Emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some crucial locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition: the Morant Bay courthouse, Bombay's Gothic railway station, the battle grounds of the 1857 uprising in India, colonial cricket fields, and, last but not least, urban riot zones.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400823031
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	01/25/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	382 KB

About the Author

Ian Baucom is the Dean of Arts&Sciences at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Locating English Identity 3
Ch. 1 The House of Memory: John Ruskin and the Architecture of Englishness 41
Ch. 2 "British to the Backbone": On Imperial Subject-Fashioning 75
Ch. 3 The Path from War to Friendship: E.M. Forster's Mutiny Pilgrimage 101
Ch. 4 Put a Little English on It: C.L.R. James and England's Field of Play 135
Ch. 5 Among the Ruins: Topographies of Postimperial Melancholy 164
Ch. 6 The Riot of Englishness: Migrancy, Nomadism, and the Redemption of the Nation 190
Afterword: Something Rich and Strange 219
Notes 225
Index 245

What People are Saying About This

Mark Wollaeger

This is a remarkable book. . . . Baucom has a lot to teach people, and his book will interest anyone concerned with cultural theory, post-coloniality, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture, or cultural studies.
— Mark Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University

From the Publisher

"An interesting, original, and elegant book on the emergence of 'Englishness' within the British Empire. . . . [T]his work proves Ian Baucom to be a superb writer and thinker."—Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana University

"This is a remarkable book. . . . Baucom has a lot to teach people, and his book will interest anyone concerned with cultural theory, post-coloniality, nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture, or cultural studies."—Mark Wollaeger, Vanderbilt University

Patrick Brantlinger

An interesting, original, and elegant book on the emergence of 'Englishness' within the British Empire. . . . [T]his work proves Ian Baucom to be a superb writer and thinker.
— Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana University

Editorial Reviews

Out of Place is an impressive volume, ambitious in its scope, sophisticated in its argument, and elegant in its execution.
— Ranu Samantrai

MLR: Modern Language Review

Examines places and institutions which housed the disciplinary projects of British imperialism and the imperial destabilizations and re-formations of English identity: Gothic architecture; the Victoria Terminus in Bombay; the Anglo-Indian Mutiny pilgrimage; the cricket field; the country house; and the zone of urban riot. Argues that, over the past century and a half, Englishness has consistently been defined through appeals to the identity-endowing properties of a place, and looks at these places as metaphors for writers struggling to define what it means to be English. Writers discussed include Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, and Salman Rushdie. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

Booknews

Honorable Mention for the 2000 First Book Prize of the Modern Language Association

From the Publisher

Out of Place is an impressive volume, ambitious in its scope, sophisticated in its argument, and elegant in its execution.

MLR: Modern Language Review - Ranu Samantrai