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Letting go of an empire is very hard to do. Although the British Empire was just about bankrupt by the end of World War II and had surrendered most of its colonies by the 1960s, it wasn't until 1998, and with as much regret as flourish, that Britain finally yielded Hong Kong, its last Crown Colony. This long duré and the momentous events that defined it produced a literature by British women writers that represents an indispensable if neglected bridge between the colonial and postcolonial eras and discourses. In the decades following E. M. Forster's skeptical but symbolically hopeful colonial critique, A Passage to India (1924), British women produced a saga of imperial self-delusion that confronts their own critical positions. In novels and memoirs that mock, castigate, and grieve the ravages of colonialism, these women show how imperial self-deceit repressed the violence that would lead to the end of Empire. From the 1930s, as Britain's power was threatened by the rise of fascism, these women witnessed and recounted the failure of Britain to recognize the malignity inherent in all imperial ideologies, policies, and practices. From their divergent but overlapping positions as settlers, exiles, and anticolonial activists, these women confronted not only how imperialism was self-destructive, but how its ideology of racial supremacy could be transformed into a threat not to Britain's global power alone, but to humankind itself.
This literature remains captivating and challenging today when empire as an idea and as a practice still rules as the force many consider responsible for the fate of postcolonial nations and peoples. As I write this, we are hearing calls for the assumption of new imperial burdens. In other respects, empire makes itself felt as it has mutated into neocolonialism, globalization, and cultural imperialism.2 But despite the devastating human costs resulting from the reign and defeat of the twentieth century's most malignant imperial power, the Third Reich, empire by any other name remains a haunting presence in a postcolonial world.The British women who wrote the end of Empire interrogate its hold on our critical and creative imaginations.
In its most approachable form, empire grips the imaginations of widely divergent audiences. From the 1980s through today, there is no end to the spate of TV miniseries and feature films based on colonial memoirs, such as Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika, on serious novels, like Ruth Prawer Jhabvalla's Heat and Dust, and on popular romance fiction, such as M. M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions. Most recently, the sixth remake of A. E.W. Mason's 1905 colonial epic, The Four Feathers, has played to full movie houses. Even postcolonial Bollywood can't let go of the Empire; witness the hugely successful 2002 film Lagaan, which narrates the defeat of the British in India as a cricket match, and in which impoverished and exploited Indian villagers are instructed by a rebelliously sympathetic young English woman. Whether this panoply of colonial and anticolonial intrigue should be seen as a sign of nostalgia for the Raj, as a critical sigh of relief for the official end of Empire, as a crisis of Western cultural confidence, or as representing ongoing tensions between East and West is still a subject of heated debates.
The urgency of these questions is evident in the concerns of postcolonial studies, which have complicated our views of an oppressive imperial past with arguments for the agency and resistance of the colonized, and with complex views of colonial relations, including non-Western perspectives. These very efforts, however, endow that oppressive past with power over the present, especially as an oppressive colonialism is found to infect postcolonial polities and literature even today.4 And yet, as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler remind us, the "Manichaean world of high colonialism that we have etched so deeply in our historiographies was nothing of the sort" (1998, 8). In agreement with Cooper and Stoler, British women writers not only bear witness to colonialism's complex relations and consequences, but also narrate actions and arguments to expedite its end. In 1974, Olivia Manning published The Rain Forest, a searing satire of British functionaries clinging to their colonial protocols in a seedy boarding house. While they shuffle their irrelevant papers and their wives compete for imperial status at the bridge table, the natives blow them all up. Like Manning, other British women writers opposed those "progressive social scientists of the 1950s" who may have recognized "that colonial rule in Africa or Asia was morally unacceptable" but who were also more committed to modernization than to dispatching colonialism "to the past" (Cooper and Stoler 1998, 15). Writers like Manning, Phyllis Bottome, Rumer Godden, and Elspeth Huxley unsettle this imperial timeline by confronting the abusive marriage of modernity's new technological violence and imperialist oppression with the urgent need for all empires to end. And so they challenge the generalized view that "an imperial outlook had been an integral feature of British public life for generations" (Ward 2001, 4).
Individually and collectively, these writers unsettle the political and imaginative power that is still awarded to colonialism today. In writing careers that extend from the 1930s through the 1970s, headlong into the postcolonial experience, many British women writers challenge assumptions about bound- aries between colonial and postcolonial writing. Including Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Muriel Spark, and Ethel Mannin, these writers show how the inconsistent and contradictory policies of the British Empire foretell its end and aftermaths. In Mandatory Palestine, for example, British promises to support both Arab nationalism and Zionism produced no resolution except an embarrassed British withdrawal. In their novels, memoirs, and reportage, we find racial and cultural entanglements growing out of the historical crises of the 1930s and 1940s, crises which blurred the boundaries of colonial identity and power and created new insights about anticolonial movements, world war, and postcolonial nationhood. We discover that the identities and politics of British sojourners in Palestine, settlers in Kenya, and colonizers in India are intertwined with those of colonized and resisting peoples, but not only within British imperial politics. They are also entangled by their collective vulnerability to other imperial antagonists: the Axis of the Japanese Empire and the Third Reich. From Africa, India, and the Caribbean to the Middle East, these women writers narrated the end of Empire as it was necessitated by the most horrific and global consequences of racially defined imperial self-justification. Race, Modernity, and the End of Empire
While by definition modern literature is always expanding and revising its boundaries, this inclusiveness has been compounded by intense attention to race as a category of analysis. It is therefore surprising if not startling that the specifically racialized decade of the 1940s and its literary concerns have found no points of convergence with postcolonial studies.5 Most significantly, despite the fact that World War II was launched by the Axis powers as an imperial conquest based on racialist ideology and precipitated the end of all European empires, there has been little attempt to integrate this most cataclysmic event into the racially defined and ever expanding and complicated postcolonial narrative. If, as postcolonial critics argue, "modernity, in all its incompleteness and instability, was made through colonialism," where is that most globally destabilizing event of modernity, the Second World War? (Burton 1992, 1). No matter how we define history, there is an inextricable relationship between the "racial modernities" that reached their apogee in the Holocaust, the necessary and decisive war to end fascism, the end of Empire, and the indecisive victories of anticolonial, antiracist narratives (Burton 1992, 3).
My argument that these British women writers are central to postcolonial debates is deeply rooted in this racial modernity. The nadir of that modernity, the Second World War, in all its totalizing constructions and destructions of difference, in its global displacements, is often said to be so ethically and experientially exceptional that it destabilizes its own discursive position. And yet as we are reminded by British women's writing, because this war is the defining moment that leads to the end of Empire, it can no longer remain absent from the postcolonial narrative. As I learned when I began to read British women writers of World War II, there were many who defied the prevailing view that fascism could be appeased and, in effect, dismissed. These women were all too willing to risk the scorn of critics and colleagues alike for a purpose rarely permitted in literary writing. Defying social and political decorum, they challenged political leaders as well as other writers and literary critics to hear their pleas for the victims displaced by Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s. As I followed their writing beyond the war, I should not have been surprised that the tragedies resulting from twenty years of fascist persecution would remain imprinted on their literary imaginations. Just as they were convinced that the Holocaust was the horrifically logical consequence of racist supremacism, so they confront us today with the dangers of marginalizing that story from the history of colonialism.