suggesting that English culture did not encourage a spirit of bold, risk-taking entrepreneurship or a belief that the principle of making profit should be extended to all forms of activity, and that these attitudes, stemming most of all from the public schools, were a vital factor in Britain’s relative economic decline.6 Racing provides a less simplistic model. On the one hand it should be clear that racing was never a profit-maximising industry dominated by commercial values. With only rare exceptions, racecourses never tried to maximise dividends. Most owners and some
. Exacting anxieties have haunted his witness of his journey from the ‘exotic’ periphery to the centre of English culture through the practice of a vocation he idealises and conceptualises with such rigid conservatism. Negotiating the periphery In 1958, on the eve of the Notting Hill riots, Naipaul saw himself as an ‘exotic writer’, ‘liv[ing] in England and depend[ing] on an English
Anti-popery had a paradoxical position in early modern English culture as both a pivotal point of unity and a potent mechanism of fracture. From the break with Rome into the early seventeenth century, anti-popery was a baseline ideology unifying Protestants in what they were against even if they could not agree on what they were for. Plotting the past into Revelation’s schema defined the English church as a martyred true church persecuted by the papal Antichrist and provided post-Reformation England
radically, it marked the recognition that civilisation, the symbolic ordering of human life, is power. Today, with the insights of Gramsci and Foucault part of the common currency of at least some domains of the academic intellectual culture, such notions trip easily from the tongue. A generation ago this was not so. In the British case – yet more if we were to think of the dominating position of English
generation whose insights would transform the lives not only of their daughters and granddaughters, but of their sons and grandsons too. Notes 1 Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London: Penguin, 2010 [1928]): 46. 2 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1975]). On soldiers’ writings, see also: Frank Field, British and French Writers of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992); Samuel Hynes, The Soldier
insight into the modernization of imperialism and nationalism themselves. And upper-class Anglo-Celtic femininity was an important part of such modernization. In Forever England Alison Light shows, through literary sources, how English culture and patriotism became bound up with domesticity and ‘the private’ at this time. 30 The tour was another representation of such modernity
thought and feeling’ which provided the roots of what it was to be West Indian. 2 James wrote his history of the revolution in San Domingue, The Black Jacobins , in 1938, after leaving Trinidad to live in the metropole, the place where journalists and writers from the colonies could hope to make a name for themselves. James was steeped in Victorian English culture, and perhaps was expressing in this
’, he subsequently wrote, ‘that London is a cold white city where English culture is great and formidable like an iceberg. It is a city created for English needs, and admirable, no doubt, for the English people. It was not built to accommodate Negroes. I was very happy when I could get out of it to go back to the Negro pale of America’, where life was more robust and less hypocritical. 60
writes, ‘Being black is warm and gay, being white is cold and sad’. 76 The Caribbean is a place of scents and colours; England a place of grey streets and dark houses. English culture is figured as machine-like, unfeeling, driven by money, repressed. The Caribbean is sensuous, passionate, vibrant, spontaneous. England, Teresa O’Connor has argued, is for Rhys male-dominated; the Caribbean is largely
involved with, Europe: an ‘enemy within’. The crisis of identity that now faced a generation of British-born West Indians, also living within but apart from English culture, was CAM’s concern. This proved true, and the special double issue of Savacou , ‘Writing away from home’ (published in 1974 but three years in the editing) is now recognised as the first anthology of black British literature. 12