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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 39-44 Postcolonialism’s Possibilities for In “Look Back at Empire: British Theatre and Imperial Decline,” Dan Rabelleto provides an overview of the ways in which British dramatists in the immediate post-war period continued to remain preoccupied with the empire. Such preoccupation manifested itself in a variety of forms and attitudes that veered from a “sentimental affection for empire” (73), to “striking a blow for colonial freedom” (74), to “a willful evasion of colonial realities” (75), and further to “a critique of banal patriotic excess” (75) or colonial stereotyping. Indeed, such trends are visible not only in plays of the immediate post-war period of imperial decline. Since John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and The Entertainer (1956), the British empire has remained an important subject and trope in plays such as Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 (1979), David Hare’s A Map of the World (1981) and more recently Tom Stoppard’s Indian Ink (1995). Themes of imperialism in these plays complicate their plots by entering into the consciousness of the characters and pervading the setting, style, and space – all elements that collectively go into the making of theatre. So persistent is the presence of Britain’s colonial past in British drama that it seems to be a question permanently imprinted in the playwrights’ imagination. Such plays, however, bear an interesting paradox. While the subject of colonialism enters the plays, the postcolonial immigrant who occupies the landscapes of the ex-imperial metropolis in the wake of decolonization, remains conspicuously absent. Remembered and recovered through dramatic themes and situations, the memories of colonial relations remain mostly limited to the far outposts of the empire. We see this over and over again: In Look Back in Anger, Colonel Redfern engages in colonial nostalgia as he remembers the “good days” of the empire and feels sorry for the moment when the last troops left the train at the railway station in India. Churchill’s Cloud 9 evokes the colonial question through the setting of the first act in an unspecified location in Africa under British colonial rule, where the flag of Britannia signals proudly the all-encompassing reach of the empire. Yet, when the action relocates to Britain in the 1970s in the second act, the colonized subject disappears. Hare’s A Map of the World is set in post-colonial Bombay and revisits through its dialogue the connections of [end page 39] neo-imperialism to classical colonization. And Indian Ink locates a large part of its action in India of the 1930s under tensions of an intensifying nationalist movement. Barring Indian Ink that casts Anish Das, an Indian, in 1980s Britain, all these plays are marked by an absence of the ex-colonial subject now living and occupying the post-colonial space of Britain. If we examine histories that have documented the presence of these marginalized subjects of the empire, such absence seems at best curious.[1] How, then, are we to read such erasures? We can perhaps locate part of our analysis in the political motivations of the plays themselves, where the colonial presence functions as a tool for enabling a reassessment of the internally fraught discourses of the center with its gender, class and nationalist politics. For example, in Look Back in Anger, the colonial question allows Jimmy Porter to complain about establishment politics for Britain’s working-class populace. In Cloud 9, it enables the playwright to link gender oppression in the 1970s under Thatcherism to the historical subordination of white women and the colonized during the 19th century. And Hare engages with the cultural remapping of otherness to comment on the limitations of western liberal-left discourses in A Map of the World. An important effect of the presence of the colonial question is that it marks an “implosion” into British theatre, turning it into an intercultural space for the consumption of western audiences.[2] Thus, the small space of the attic in Look Back in Anger, where the protagonists of the play reside, becomes analogous to the reduced space of the empire in post-colonial times. Similarly, Cloud 9 transforms the stage in Act I into imperial Africa that enables the play of gender, race, and imperial politics in the 19th century. In A Map of the World, the lobby of the Bombay hotel, where the main action is staged, constitutes the primary spot throughout the play, and in Indian Ink, the spaces of 1980s England and 1930s India are so deliberately merged that it would be difficult to identify any visible borders between the two. Yet, borders do exist. While the politics of colonialism play out on British stages, and transform these stages into hybrid and intercultural arenas, the borders between empire and colony and across race still exist in vocabularies that evoke images of “wogs” or “savages” as in Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, or show servants as only capable of stealing as in Indian Ink. It is precisely the existence of such borders in the political rhetoric and the blindness to Britain’s ex-colonial population in the political sphere that has enabled their removal from the plays. Their erasure is particularly troubling as immigrants from the ex-colonies live and face the consequences of colonial histories as they play out in the political theatre that works towards removing the immigrant from the “national imaginary” [end page 40] through a hegemonic apparatus, and strives to remove them physically through immigration laws. Indeed, immigration policies under what Rushdie has called “the new empire within Britain” identified the presence of non-whites as symptomatic of everything that was wrong with Britain. Thatcher’s racist rhetoric and policies to maintain a pure English nation turned out to be yet another face of colonization, that manifested right at home in the form of a “new racism” directed against minorities from previously colonized constituencies such as India, Pakistan, Africa, and the Caribbean (Smith). While colonialism’s terms expressed absolute divisions between empire and colony, the terms of “new racism” came to be located in the exclusionary rhetoric of nationhood at home, which marked people of color as being outsiders to Britain, and whose interests were located in other nations (Smith). In addition to immigration controls and policies that regulated national borders to enable only selective entry from the Black commonwealth, immigrants faced exclusions in the areas of housing and education. Yet, even as policymakers reproduced the old imperial rhetoric of singular identities based on racial classifications, they could not dispel Britain’s black population from the social and cultural landscape of the nation, whose presence not only hybridized the nation state but also produced new hyphenated identities increasingly articulated in the realm of culture. Thus, within the nation imagined by Thatcher or her conservative predecessors such as Enoch Powell, there also emerged spaces where minorities began to articulate their presence to account for the absences that marked political and theatrical discourses. To this end, Britain saw an outburst of theatrical energy amongst Asian immigrants, especially in the 1970s with the inception of theatre companies such as Tara Arts and Tamasha. To foreground their own identities, these theatre groups began staging plays from the Indian subcontinent to understand their literary and theatrical heritage and to contest misrepresentations of Asians in mainstream theatre. To quote one of the characters in Hanif Kureishi’s Borderline, they came to function as the “worm in the body” and unsettle dominant systems and ideologies. Following Tara Arts, groups such as the Kali Theatre Company produced numerous plays by Asian authors and performed them in a variety of venues. Although these companies and playwrights have not yet received sustained critical attention, they produce hybridized works of political engagement, operating, as they do, within the interstices of Asian and British cultures. Writing from the margins of society and making their lived experience an integral part of their theatre, Asian playwrights have reconfigured the space of theatre by foregrounding colored Britain and its inhabitants at the center of British society, transforming, in the process, theatre into a site of intercultural struggles. Thus playwrights such as [end page 41] Jatinder Verma, Harwant Bains, Hanif Kureishi, Ayub Khan Din, Rukhsana Ahmad, and others, foreground experiences of racism and gendered violence in the plays. The use of Hindustani or Punjabi and practices such as dancing and singing that artists bring into the verbal and non-verbal style of theatre are devices that facilitate the subversion of the authority of English language and culture and foreground the ways in which their own linguistic and cultural heritage provides important means for representing their multiply constituted selves. Additionally, references to public and private spaces such as airports and domestic homes impart a framework that connects the private lives of individuals to the public world of politics, border controls, and community networks within which characters negotiate issues of identity, nation, home and citizenship. Overall, the very presence of Asian plays in Britain, “necessitates a restructuring of English theatre from within, displacing authoritative versions of ‘English’ theatre … and inventing an indigenous theatre which throws into relief much of current English theatre” (Godiwala 45). This alternative space of theatre, however, is by no means a homogenous one that reconstructs a singular diasporic identity. Idealized repre-sentations of “homelands,” as places that sustain a sense of longing and belonging for communities living under racial and other exclusions, are often marked by tensions and conflict, especially when it comes to questions of gender. For, in their search for an alternative space of desire, diasporic communities also invent new orthodoxies – social and familial – that accord women the burden of carrying out family duties and norms that can contribute to their social disempowerment. Playwrights such as Rukhsana Ahmad have brought attention to such issues in the Song for a Sanctuary, a play inspired by the murder of an Indian woman by her abusive husband at a women’s shelter where she seeks refuge. Here Ahmad focuses on the tribulations of Rajinder, a woman for whom neither of her homes (the local home in England where she resides with her husband and children, or the home she left behind in India) are idealized locations or sanctuaries. Combined with the discrimination Rajinder faces from other women at the shelter and with the limited protection from the police, who dismiss matters of abuse as “domestic” or “cultural” issues, idealized norms about “home” come to mark zones of social and familial entrapment. Haunted by the notion of “shame,” she is unable to break the silence about her own and her daughter’s abuse at the hands of her husband, and finally falls prey to his murderous designs. To this end, even the transitory home where she seeks temporary refuge is unable to give her the necessary protection and safety. Ahmad presents her theme through a hybrid and intercultural apparatus that combines the con-[end page 42]ventions of a realist drama presented through a linear plot that is fractured by the presence of songs and conversations in Punjabi and a violent resolution in the form of Rajinder’s murder. In foregrounding questions of imperialism, postcoloniality, identity, immigration, race-relations, and violence from the margins of British society, Asian playwrights bring an added complexity to the corpus of British theatre and remind audiences that histories of empire do not belong only to the past. Rather, they remain an integral part of the everyday lives of citizens and subjects in the postcolonial present, entering into public stages of nation-states through shards of memory and cultural fragments that include language, clothing, songs etc., in order to turn these stages into fertile grounds for debating and negotiating their lives. If postcolonial discourses have enabled us to account for glaring absences of postcolonial subjectivities in textual representations and equipped us with critical tools for exploring complex and hybridized processes stemming from colonial and post-colonial encounters, then reading these comparative cross-currents within British theatre practice will enable us to achieve a more complicated understanding of colonial histories and their ramifications in the present. It is only by reading multifaceted texts together and locating them within comparative frameworks of knowledge, histories of colonization, and relations of power, that we can move towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of intercultural practices that are crucial to an understanding of comparative literary studies.
[1]. For a useful overview of postcolonial migrants in Britain, see Stuart Hall’s essay, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question.” [2]. I owe the use of the term “implosion” to John MacKenzie who, in “The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture,” refers to decolonization as the “Implosion on Empire” to “convey a sense of the political upheavals on the colonial periphery reverberating inwards on metropolitan society.” MacKenzie describes “implosion” as a dramatic word, which “happens rapidly, dramatically, and indeed painfully” (21). [end page 43]
References Ahmad, Rukhsana, “Song for a Sanctuary.” Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers. Ed. Kadija George. London: Aurora Press, 1993: 159-86 Churchill, Caryl, Cloud 9. London: Pluto Press, 1979 Godiwala, Dimple, “Invention/ Hybridity/ Identity: British Asian Culture and Its Post-Colonial Theatres.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures (JSBC) 8.1 (2001): 41-55 Hall, Stuart, “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question.” In Un/Settled Multiculturalisms. Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. Ed. Barnor Hesse. London & New York: Zed Books, 2000: 209-41 Hare, David, A Map of the World. London: Faber and Faber, 1983 Kureishi, Hanif, Borderline. London: Methuen/“ The Royal Court Writers Series,” 1981 MacKenzie, John, “The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture.” British Culture and the End of Empire. Ed. Stuart Ward. Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 2001: 21-36 Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger [1956]. London: Faber and Faber, 1980. ___, The Entertainer. Plays: 2. London: Faber and Faber, 1998 Rebellato, Dan, “Look Back at Empire: British Theatre and Imperial Decline.” British Culture and the End of Empire. Ed. Stuart Ward. Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 2001: 73-90 Rushdie, Salman, “The New Empire within Britain.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta Books in Association with Viking, 1991: 129-38 Smith, Anna Marie, New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality: Britain, 1968-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994 Stoppard, Tom, Indian Ink. London: Faber and Faber, 1995 Verma, Jatinder, “Bingluishing the Stage: A Generation of Asian Theatre in England.” Theatre Matters: Performance and Culture on the World Stage. Ed. Richard Boon & Jane Plastow. Cambridge: Cambridge UP/“Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre,” 1998: 126-34
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