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are thus understandably the privileged loci of postcolonial literature and cultural studies, evidenced by the slew of theorization on multicultural London by, for example, Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, and the creative success of Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Bernardine Everaristo. Englishness, the sort that inspires nostalgia for a lost imperial age, will never be the same. The same holds for “Frenchness,” or for any other European identity nostalgically yearning for the elusive “purity” of modernity, for the European countries upholding these identities must ultimately come to terms with their multiracial and multicultural dimension, with the “empire” at their doorstep.
In the collection’s opening essay, Lucienne Loh ventures through the seemingly innocuous rural British landscape and excavates sediments of imperialistic history under the surface of, for instance, Suffolk in East Anglia. In approaching German writer W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1998), Loh introduces a working concept of her own alloy, “ironic nostalgia”—a variant of Paul Gilroy’s notion of “postimperial melancholy”—in order to account for the fact that in this nostalgia there is no harking after an illusory, idyllic past. Sebald provides the traditional material, including the manor home as a metonymy for Englishness, while stressing the fallen state of imperial splendor and further forcing the reader to acknowledge the sources of nostalgia. These sites of historical amnesia and the concomitant histories of the rural spaces beyond Britain’s shores—what Loh calls the “rural networks of empire”—make up both the violent histories of the British Empire and postcolonial immigrant subjectivities. Loh’s reading of rural Britain as mirroring the cultural production of empire recalls the materialist approach as articulated by James Clifford, Clifford Geertz, Arjun Appadurai, Edward Soja, and David Harvey.
In her reading of British Barry Unsworth’s quasi-autobiographical novel Sugar and Rum (1999), Jennifer Nesbitt considers writer’s block as a symptom of a postcolonial logic of exploitation in and as culture: although the character of the author in Unsworth’s novel is denied the possibility of framing his own narratives, it is intimated that framing narratives about “others” is an innately exploitative act. In this end-of-millennium story,