File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1996/96-12-06.070, message 152


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




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