Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 Resistance in Interaction

This book explores the political and textual interrelations which linked anti-colonialists, nationalists, and modernists in the years 1890-1920. Focusing on both canonical and less well-known figures, and interconnecting Europe, India, and South Africa, the book considers how resistance to domination and nationalist processes of 'making new' emerged not only in reaction to the colonizer but due to the interaction between colonial margins at the time.

Résumé
Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, Boehmer builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and ofmodernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South Africannationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that 'a colonized people is not alone', Boehmer significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.