Book Review: Post-Empire Imaginaries?: Anglophone Literature, History and the Demise of Empires (original) (raw)

2017, Transnational Literature

The collection of essays collated by Barbara Buchenau, Virginia Richter and Marijke Denger in Post Empire Imaginaries?: Anglophone Literature, History and the Demise of Empires encapsulates an emerging critical theory that has come to be known as the Post-Empire. The term is less a commentary following the fall of Empire than a theoretics that seeks to establish the framework around which we now view the social, cultural, political and economic ramifications of empire on the contemporary consciousness. The introduction, by Buchenau and Richter, is an exposition dedicated to establishing the need for post-imperial criticism, they suggest that fictive literature provides a framework for an imaginative post-imperial position which allows a literary conceptualisation of empire which is at once playful and critical. However, Buchenau and Richter's conception of this post-empire imaginary has the tendency to romanticise the memory of empire. Furthermore, it is questionable as to how much of post-colonial criticism is consumed in the post-imperial approach and vice versa. Some of the collected essays suggest that the post-colonial is more keenly focused on the interplay between core and periphery, while others make little distinction between the post-colonial and the post-imperial. Rainer Emig's essay, The Hermeneutics of Empire: Imperialism as an Interpretation Strategy, poses an excellent counterpoint to Buchenau and Richter's post-empire romantics. Emig is diligent in his treatment of the great propaganda mill of imperial institution. Identifying the subtle cultural production of patriotism and imperial spirit in literary forms, Emig takes the opportunity to illustrate how post-colonial criticism, particularly in literature and film, challenged British imperial traditions. Emig focuses directly on the film adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, showing that the imperialistic and propagandistic tropes he exposes are prolific in the American film industry. Emig's essay gives consideration to the ways in which modern philosophy has forced us to reconsider the collective imagining of the imperial past. In a similar fashion, Eva Maria Müller exposes the discursive empire-building practices of education. Invoking Louis Althusser and Benedict Anderson, she illustrates the ways in which the teacher figure was utilised to reinforce imperial didacticism and how schools of the empire became outposts in service to continuing the displacement of subaltern cultures and societies through the institution of empire. While this is not a new concept in imperial theorising, Müller's study of the teacher figure 'as metonyms for the Australian nation' (101) contributes to the framework for a post-imperial analysis of education as an imperial institution. Kerstin Knopf takes a similar bent to Müller with regard to the moralising didacticism of the empire but manages to push the notion further through his exposition of imperial exploratory practice. Knopf establishes the mythologising of Arctic exploration in the collective British imperial consciousness as critical to its reputation as coloniser. Invoking Jen Hill, Knopf shows that the Arctic space represented the limit of both the British Empire and human experience and that the role of Arctic exploration was to 'break … this limit and transform it from an empty into an imperial space' (72). Looking at the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin in 1845, Knopf highlights the similarities between the British stoicism inherent in the myth of Franklin's voyage and that which is espoused by Victorian literature. In doing so, Knopf re-evaluates the role of imperial