Postimperial Melancholia

Something that I enjoyed about my degree was not only the books, plays, and poems that I read, but the social, cultural, psychoanalytical, and political theory that went alongside them. So much so that I took an entire theory module in my second year (perhaps I will do a post on a topic from that at a later date).

One piece of theory that has stuck in my head has been Paul Gilroy’s essay ‘Has it Come to This?’, from his book After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. I studied this as part of a module called Acts of Writing: From Decolonisation to Globalisation, and alongside The Good Immigrant, an anthology of personal essays about race, immigration, and identity edited by Nikesh Shukla.

The thing that stood out to me most about Gilroy’s essay was his idea of ‘postimperial melancholia’. I found this to be a fairly complex concept at first, and I didn’t go on to include it in any of my university essays, but I will try to revisit and summarise it here as it is something that has stayed with me as being a really effective analysis of the British (post)colonial psyche. (I did actually reference it in an article I wrote for Twentysomething News after graduating.)

Gilroy wrote this essay in 2004, in the aftermath of Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq and a time when an ‘us and them’ attitude was being solidified in contemporary Western culture.

Postimperial melancholia centres around the idea that there is an outside threat to British culture, and that British culture defines itself in terms of this outside threat. The 1980s in Britain saw a move towards racism in cultural rather than biological terms, doing away with the pseudo-scientific ideas of racism of previous times, but resolidifying the idea of British national identity against ‘alien’ outsiders who could never, in the British psyche’s opinion, understand or integrate with our ways of living. Political figures such as Enoch Powell constructed imagery of immigrants ‘swamping’ the country. This was an image later repeated by David Cameron when he referred to the ‘swarms’ of immigrants and asylum seekers coming to the UK (many of which have been displaced by British bombs). This reductive language has been repeatedly used to solidify this need to preserve the British national identity above all others.

In relation to this, Gilroy states, ‘once the history of the Empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historial, cultural, or political connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects’. As a country that once dominated a quarter of the globe, can we not recognise the enforced cultural connections between us and so many countries we now brand as ‘alien’? This very British way of solving something uncomfortable by simply not talking about it (not unless we are the hero/victim anyway) still permeates.

Gilroy implies that the loss of Empire is felt on a subconscious level. The assumption that we as a nation and a people are, and have always been, in control, and the subsequent panic at the realisation that we are losing that control (be it politically or culturally) is what characterises this postimperial melancholia. Gilroy emphasises that the images of war which characterised his early life are still used as leverage now in British cultural consciousness to produce a (now false) sense of homogeneity. He asks, ‘How is it that their [images of war’s] potency can be undiminished by the passage of time, and why do they alone provide the touchstone for the desirable forms of togetherness that are used continually to evaluate the chaotic, multicultural present and find it lacking?’. These images of war are certainly potent, even in my generation, but they are falsely remembered: a wilful amnesia has been leveraged in the convenient forgetting of the involvement of non-British soldiers in our victory.

This sentiment that is based around a rhetoric of victory against an external evil, Gilroy says, allows us to ‘become certain that we are still good while our uncivilized enemies are irredeemably evil’. It allows us to name a ‘bad guy’ that we defeated, to obscure the fact that for the more than 33 countries that we invaded during the time of Empire we were, and still continue to be, that very same ‘bad guy’.

What’s more, Gilroy highlights some very recognisable instances of present-day melancholia. These occur in moments ‘where it is discovered that English kids call 911 rather than 999 when they want the help of the police, ... or that their traditional vowels are being Australianized’. These instances of anguish were so familiar to me – I heard them often as I grew up – and they represent a loss of presumed control; those which we once colonised can now colonise us, through language and culture. We are no longer the dominant global force and our national identity seems to go into meltdown without this. Melancholia is caused by a re-colonising of British identity through the global influence of previously colonised countries.

Our past homogeneity centred around our domination of others, around a sense of whiteness as civilised and superior. When this domination and whiteness were eventually exposed as violent and harmful, we didn’t work through it; we simply pushed it into hiding. Now when we as a nation wish to experience a sense of togetherness, we must either gesture back to past experiences, or present ourselves against a constructed other, someone to ‘win’ against in this cultural war that we find ourselves in.

I think this topic resonated with me so much because it perfectly captures multiple aspects of the British national psyche: its inability to talk about the things it gets wrong, its need for good/bad binaries, and the subsequent construction of its identity in relation to the cultural ‘other’. I learned more about the British Empire from Aboriginal people when I lived in Australia for a year than the whole 21 years of my life up until that point. In history at secondary school, I had only really learned about World War II. I think that says a lot about our ability to come to terms with the realities of our own history, realities that continue to inform our present. Scholars like Gilroy help us to deconstruct our adamantly-buried histories and push forward to a better reality for all.