Perennial Empires: Postcolonial, Transnational, and Literary Pers ...

needs to be couched in irony. I argue that this irony is structured around Sebald’s consistent juxtaposition of the fallen state of imperial splendor with the historical violence that once propped up erstwhile displays of opulence. Nostalgia is often associated with indulgence in the pleasures of the past as a means to retreat from a corrupted present, but ironic nostalgia reveals that the past is always corrupted. The concept of ironic nostalgia therefore offers an alternative to what critics (e.g., Samuel) have called “soft-focus nostalgia,” a kind of history that panders largely to emotional responses to a lost past.

The concept of ironic nostalgia that I apply to The Rings of Saturn addresses the racial marginalization of Britain’s immigrant communities in rural England. As a response to what Paul Gilroy calls “postimperial melancholy,” ironic nostalgia criticizes the material culture that nurtures nostalgia and resists the nationalist—and for Gilroy, racist—sentiments that nostalgia is commonly perceived to support in the British rural context (Gilroy, After Empire 107–109). Ironic nostalgia acknowledges the social and economic conditions, often linked to imperialism, that afford nostalgia itself, but it also undermines the fundamental role imperial nostalgia plays within the nation’s consciousness and identity. Ironic nostalgia thus resists the way in which the frequently conservative sentiment of nostalgia is harnessed to ideas of tradition and heritage in order to promote a sense of racial exclusiveness in rural England. Ironic nostalgia endeavors to address Gilroy’s argument that “what Orwell would have regarded as an authentically geo-pious Anglo patriotism, can, in fact, be” adapted to the demands of multicultural society” (After Empire 104) and nowhere is this patriotism more evident than in England’s pastoral consciousness.

Sebald’s undercutting of a traditionally nostalgic attitude in The Rings of Saturn also reflects a struggle with his own German identity and the horrors embedded in Germany’s fascist past. The view of his own country’s history invariably taints Sebald’s vision of imperial history, doubtlessly a vision permanently marred by the consequences of the Nazis’ maniacal obsession with race and imperial ambitions. Sebald’s relationship to German history colors his relationship to the