Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I think he’s a really interesting historian who writes very beautifully. It’s a historical essay – the thesis of which is somewhat contra Edward Said’s arguments in his book Orientalism. Part of Cannadine’s argument is that there was much more cultural interpenetration in the British Empire, certainly in India, than Said suggests. But also its central contention is that the British Empire wanted to see in other cultures a replication of its own power structure, and of its own aristocracy and royalty.
Your first book?
It’s a highly recommendable book of about five chapters by David Cannadine called Ornamentalism. I think he’s a really interesting historian who writes very beautifully. It’s a historical essay – the thesis of which is somewhat contra Edward Said’s arguments in his book Orientalism. Part of Cannadine’s argument is that there was much more cultural interpenetration in the British Empire, certainly in India, than Said suggests. But also its central contention is that the British Empire wanted to see in other cultures a replication of its own power structure, and of its own aristocracy and royalty, and wanted to weld them into the British Empire.
They expected those cultures to reflect British hierarchies?
They read those cultures from their own cultural paradigm, and wanted the Empire to fuse with pre-existing power structures (which is also contra Said). It wasn’t this massive blanket racism within the British Empire – actually there was an awful lot of respect, particularly in the Indian world, although obviously that’s in front of the Iron Fist of the Empire and a bottom line of power. In much the same way, Pocahontas had been brought over and introduced to King James as the ‘American princess’, and was introduced at court and received as an aristocrat.
The Empire didn’t recognise black aristocrats like Shaka Zulu.
I think the African colonial experience is very different – it’s a much more brutal and rapacious kind of colonialism with much less respect involved. In Ornamentalism he’s writing about this particular cultural moment of British aristocrats mainly, who, after the First World War and with social change, couldn’t afford to live the life they had been living in Britain any more, and so moved out to places like Kenya and recreated this feudal fantasy world, in which some people are evidently still living. That element of fantasy or fantasy fulfilment that you find throughout the British Empire I found very interesting and intriguing, and evidently in Kenya that takes a particularly debauched tone with the world of Happy Valley.
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Adam Foulds is a novelist and poet whose most recent novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 and won the 2010 Southbank Show Award for Literature. His ‘verse novella’ The Broken Word, an epic poem set in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2008. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2008.
