From: L.J.Connell-AT-sussex.ac.uk (Liam Connell) Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 10:09:24 GMT Subject: pedantic poco Just a quick note re: some responses to my hurried comments of yesterday - these are going to be a bit hurried as well so I apologise in advance... First off my discussion of _Remains of the Day_ were about the film rather than the book and so I'm happy to concede that the representations in the book may be more sophisticated than I gave them credit for - I haven't read it so I can't really say. Second my somewhat imprecise reference to MI films was really a reference to their period drama rather than their Indian-Indian films since they receive a saturation distribution that their others films do not - in Britain at least. My point about these films and their relation to a project "that attempts to reconfirm Britishness as racially homogenous," which I concede is "a flabby academic term that also needs elaboration" and I'm afraid I'm not going to satisfactorily do that here. However I do think that the fact these films were being made, particularly those about an Edwardian Britain, at a time when a government is espousing Victorian values of morality while simultaneously proposing "free market" economics and insulating Britain from ethnic diversity with more and more restrictive immigration policy, is not accidental. To say that Thatcher was colour-blind b/c she was pro-entrepreneur is a fallacy. For a start it assumes that the Free-market is free, when in fact it requires the exercise of a huge amount of intervention in order to create that illusion. The strong showing of the National Front in 1979 for example was quickly followed by their complete disappearance (until recently) from the British political map. This was not, as the Anti-Nazi League would claim, a result of popular protest (although that protest is to be commended), rather it was a result of the fact that (and here I'm paraphrasing one of the leaders of the NF from the 70s) the NF saw its agenda being successfully put into practice by the Thatcher administration. Thatcher's whole economic transformation was founded on nostalgia - the mobilization of a narrowly-racist nationalism which evokes memories of the empire as well as an ethnically and racially homogeneous population. That the MI films eg. _Passage to India_ contributed to this nostalgia seems to me without question - although what the precise relation between them and gov. policy does need examination. I'll go away and think about that one but *please* feel free to disagree with me. One more thought is a reading suggestion is Salman Rushdie on Passage and the Raj Quartet - can't remember the exact reference but its probably in Salman Rushdie, _Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991_ (London: Granta Books, 1992). Liam --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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