In the last five decades, a growing body of work has focused on “the imagery, literary representations, beliefs, and ideologies which empire builders, and their opponents, produced.”1,2
Empire is no longer seen in terms of political and economic relationships alone, but also as a cultural process, in which colonial cultures are “not simply ideologies that mask, mystify or rationalize forms of oppression that are external to them” but are “also expressive and constitutive of colonial relationships in themselves.”3 In these approaches to empire, literary texts are seen as symbolic vehicles of colonial authority, albeit often unstable and contradictory ones.4 Imperial literatures exist in reciprocal interaction with empire; they reflect empire as a composite and multiethnic political body while also playing a role in its constitution and expansion, expressing and shaping the attitudes and perceptions which create and uphold it as a composite entity.5 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper's Empires in World History.
Power and the Politics of Difference outlines a global framework in which to understand empires in terms of their “politics of difference,” ranging from recognizing the multiplicity of peoples and their customs as an ordinary fact of life, to drawing a boundary between civilized insiders and barbarian outsiders. Empires relied on varying degrees of incorporation and differentiation, and they could “mix, match, and transform their ways of rule” accordingly.6 As other historians have pointed out, empires were organized to administer and exploit diversity; they were comfortable with and even thrived on it, and were “marked by heterogeneity and shifting frontiers.”7 This chapter draws on these approaches to the diversity within empires. It considers imperial and anti-imperial literatures in terms of the representation and dramatization of difference, as well as its subversion and interrogation. The first section considers literature's key role in the education of imperial elites in Rome, China, the Middle East, and the Persianate world in the premodern era. In these empires, conceptions of civilization, ideas of polite literature,1 I am indebted to Peter Fibiger Bang for his many useful comments on this chapter.
2 Howe 2002, 123.
3 Ballantyne 2008, 2.
4 Boehmer 1995, 13, 50; see also Ballantyne 2008, passim.
5 Here I draw on Howe's definition of empire in Howe 2002, 30.
6 Burbank and Cooper 2010, 11-13 and chapter 11 in this volume.
7 D'Altroy 2001, 125; Barfield 2001, 29.
Javed Majeed, Literature of Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly,
Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0010. and notions of governance went hand in hand. While in the modern era the novel had a pivotal role in spreading world languages like English, French, and Spanish, in the pre-modern age poetry had a more important place in the training of imperial elites. The second section discusses how imperial literatures imagined the boundaries between the civilized self and the barbarian other, but it also shows how they illustrated the porosity of those boundaries. Post-imperial texts like Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) explore these permeable boundaries, and show how imperial subjects made psychic and symbolic investments in the figure of the barbarian. In doing so, they dramatize how imperial epic narratives give way to romance narratives of dissent and resistance. In the third section I examine how the idea of the “classical” was important to imperial literatures and civilizations, and how in the modern era Greek and Latin classics were appropriated by Asian and American writers and thinkers for their own political and cultural purposes. These appropriations signal how empires were sites for intellectual, linguistic, cultural, and literary exchange and hybridization, albeit in contexts of racial and gendered oppression.
The second half of the chapter considers how the multilingualism of empires created linguistic choices for writers. In these multilingual environments, lexicography was a key genre that negotiated the relationships between imperial and local languages. In the modern epoch, both colonial and anti-colonial novelists mixed languages and combined cultural frames when they represented their societies and their narrators. By bringing together cultures, languages, and literatures, empires also produced distinctive cosmopolitanisms, which straddled the colonialnationalist divide, and led to the authoring of texts that were simultaneously nationalist and cosmopolitan in orientation. These cosmopolitan nationalisms are indicative of how the shaping of political imaginations within and against empires were more complex than simply a move from empire to the nation- state. Indeed, for some writers, becoming national was a burdensome process, sometimes intolerably so, and they give expression to the messiness of becoming national in their novels and short stories. One form of cosmopolitan politics was communism; the political imagination of socialist-inspired anti-colonial writers was formed within and against empires and by its very nature this imagination was transregional and internationalist, as was the literature it produced. Thus, while empires were politically and economically oppressive, they also expanded the range of literary traditions, aesthetic possibilities, linguistic choices, and creative opportunities for authors and poets, both imperial and colonized, for whom the dramatization of difference and its subversion became significant components in their writing.