Melancholia

In his book After Empire, Paul Gilroy writes about the “imperial melancholia” that Britons have come to feel following the end of their empire. Gilroy's discussion owes as much to the social psychology of Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich (Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, “The Inability to Mourn”) as to Freud's analyses of mourning, melancholia, and narcissism.^[1320] The Mitscherlichs wrote about “the loss of a fantasy of omnipotence,” and Gilroy extends their work to say: “From this perspective, before the British people can adjust to the horrors of their modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism, they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of co­lonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit, to understand the damage it did to their political culture at home and abroad, and to consider the extent of their country's complex investments in the ethnic absolutism that has sustained it.” Gilroy adds that Britons have been slow to work through “[t]he multilayered trauma—economic and cultural as well as political and psychological—involved in accepting the loss of the Empire.”^[1321] As a result of their slowness in working through this trauma, he suggests, the British have been unable to deal fairly with questions of race, ethnicity, and nationhood or to respond hospitably to the arrival of immigrants, especially those who come from former colonies.

One reason why the trauma of imperial loss has been treated inadequately is that the public sphere in Britain has not dealt effectively with memories of empire. Many Britons are embarrassed and ashamed about the country's imperial past and want to forget that part of the nation's history, even if they were actively involved in it and even if they ultimately cannot forget. Many of those who were born during or after World War II suppose that the history of the British Empire has little rel­evance to the modern nation.

J. Enoch Powell, who was a classical scholar before he gained notoriety as a poli­tician, is sometimes characterized as an extreme personification of this condition, but he was an unusually articulate spokesperson for a widespread phenomenon. He had a way of conjuring up images that would catch the attention of the press and the public, as he did when he spoke of the river foaming with much blood or of the time the black man would have the whip-hand over the white man. After Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party, dismissed him from the shadow cab­inet on the grounds that his speech was “racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions,” polls showed the public coming out in support of Powell by an overwhelming majority: in a survey conducted by the Wolverhampton Express and Star, 372 thought that Heath was right to dismiss him, but 35,000 said Heath was wrong.^[1322] What is interesting about Powell, in this context, is that, as an older man, he did not boast loudly about the Empire and appeared to have lost his youthful enthusiasm for it. But he, like his many supporters, was able to talk ex­plicitly about racial and ethnic issues, the perils of immigration, and the decline of England, and all these conversations “drew upon memories of the imperial past.”^[1323] As Bill Schwarz writes, “Inside the nation's forgetfulness about empire, the memory-traces remained.

Traces of imperial melancholia permeated through the culture broadly and could be found in non-racial discourses as well. In the early 1980s, Salman Rushdie fa­mously attacked novels, television series, and films set in colonial India for their “Raj revisionism” and pointed out that they were proliferating roughly at the same time as the Falkland Islands war, which, in his view, was spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher, “who most plainly nailed her colours to the colonial mast, claiming that the success in the South Atlantic proved that the British were still the people ‘who had ruled a quarter of the world.' ”^[1325] Raj nostalgia was really connected with the ideologies of the ruling Conservatives, as Rushdie argued, and would not lead to a deeper historical appreciation of the fraught British presence in India or the rela­tionship between Indians and Britons in the colonial period. It was associated with melancholia and was a defensive response to the traumatic loss of empire: it put Rushdie “in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb.”^[1326] Raj nostalgia flourished for some years but now has been subsumed into neo-Victorian and neo- Edwardian fiction, which consists of texts set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, not all these texts are explicitly about empire (for instance, Possession, by A. S. Byatt, offers only a fleeting glance at a postcolonial interlocutor), and some are explicitly critical about the colonial power and/or created outside the old met­ropolitan center of London (for instance, the Hindi film Lagaan). These texts are not just colonialist in the sense that Rushdie deplored, therefore, but also postco­lonial, in all the senses of that term. To quote one scholar who has written about the genre, “the return to the Victorian in the present offers a highly visible, highly aestheticized code for confronting empire again and anew; it is a site within which the memory of empire and its surrounding discourses and strategies of representa­tion can be replayed and played out.”^[1327]

Britain is not the only country to suffer from the kind of imperial melancholia that Gilroy describes, and he himself mentions Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands as other countries that have yet to fully acknowledge their colonial histories and the violence done to the colonized and the colonizer in the name of empire.^[1328] To this list, one should also add the United States of America, a country which has continued to act as an imperialist power in our time.

But it is misleading to talk about imperial melancholia only in relation to the colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Washington, D.C., or only in relation to places such as Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and Tibet where empire survives. Many people today manifest a form of nostalgia for the Muslim Caliphate. Algeria, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, the Korean Peninsula, South Africa, and the Caribbean, all are locations in which memories of empire still remain, where men and women hark back to a lost golden age and dream of an earlier po­litical order. To varying degrees, a sense of trauma and feelings of melancholia and nostalgia can be perceived among some groups in these postcolonial cultures. We can discern these emotions most starkly in local elites, abandoned or largely for­gotten by the colonizers, and not as successful or powerful as they once were, but also among subalterns and non-elites. A whole body of prose and verse has explored how questions of empire persist in the words and actions of people living in former colonies, in memories and memoirs, visual materials, archives, institutions, and bureaucracies. J. M. Coetzee, Anita Desai, Seamus Heaney, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Derek Walcott, and Rushdie himself can be counted among the most dis­tinguished exponents of this literature in English. Not only do they examine the bloody legacies of the colonial past: they also explore the many charms, allures, and seductions of empire and depict the betrayal and disappointment left in its wake.