| Chapter 1: | Postimperial Rural Histories and “Ironic Nostalgia” in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn |
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spaces where attempts at racial integration and diversity are rarely contemplated, largely ignored, and positively challenged.
By offering alternative circuits of imperial commerce, capital, and consumption embedded in the history of rural Suffolk, The Rings of Saturn makes available different perspectives of British imperialism. These networks of imperial commerce and trade, routed through rural England, have been explored by a number of postcolonial critics, including Edward Said, Ian Baucom, and Paul Gilroy, who argue through a predominantly cultural-materialist lens that the preservation of the ideals of rural England depends on a disassociation from potentially compromising histories that would admit the roles of other cultures and countries. Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1973) articulates this argument in its most established form.
Edward Said argues in his fundamental study, Culture and Imperialism (1993), that “Britain’s great humanistic ideas, institutions and monuments” are still celebrated “as having the power ahistorically to command our approval” (82). Said’s emphasis on the “power” of the ahistoric aura that surrounds Britain’s “humanistic ideas, institutions and monuments” suggests in part why these institutions continue to actively promote national pride and prompt international recognition. This power depends today on the residual memory of notions of civilization, notions that once justified wielding imperial might throughout British colonies and are recollected—again “ahistorically”—through the display of highly visible architectural façades. The splendors of Britain’s remaining manor homes continue to serve as iconic repositories of such memories. Through a reading of The Rings of Saturn, I argue not only that Sebald suggests that this power is sustained in the context of the English countryside precisely because these spaces persistently “command … approval” but also that he rejects any dehistoricized, idealized vision of these spaces.
Sebald presents, through what I term ironic nostalgia, the material history within rural England that inspires imperial nostalgia. Placing images which continue to “command approval” against the wider circuits of imperial violence, Sebald simultaneously suggests that this nostalgia