Out of Place

by Ian Baucom

In a 1968 speech on British immigration policy, Enoch Powell insisted that although a black man may be a British citizen, he can never be an Englishman. This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. Ian Baucom reveals how "Englishness" emerged against the institutions and experiences of the British Empire, rendering English culture subject to local determinations and global negotiations. In his view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity.


Analyzing imperial crisis zones--including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981--Baucom asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. To answer this question, he draws on a surprising range of sources: Victorian and imperial architectural theory, colonial tourist manuals, lexicographic treatises, domestic and imperial cricket culture, country house fetishism, and the writings of Ruskin, Kipling, Ford Maddox Ford, Forster, Rhys, C.L.R. James, Naipaul, and Rushdie--and representations of urban riot on television, in novels, and in parliamentary sessions. Emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some crucial locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition: the Morant Bay courthouse, Bombay's Gothic railway station, the battle grounds of the 1857 uprising in India, colonial cricket fields, and, last but not least, urban riot zones.

Genres: Nonfiction, Criticism, Academia, Theory

Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this as a resource for one of my PhD thesis chapters which looks at the construct of Englishness. The text is extremely accessible and Baucom provides an insightful argument covering national and international perceptions of Englishness cited in texts from Ruskin, Naipaul, and Rushdie.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting look at Englishness and what it means through the lens of empire. The chapters on Ruskin, the Victoria Terminus, cricket and C.L.R James and Forster were the strongest. Many great insights into the English character and what it means to be English.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baucom examines six spaces— Gothic architecture, the Victoria Terminus in Bombay, the Anglo-Indian Mutiny pilgrimage, the cricket field, the country house, and the zone of urban riot—each of which is a space of both imperialism and imperial destabilization, mastery and loss, exertion of control and loss of command. In charting a course from John Ruskin to Salman Rushdie and back, this book shows that the loss of cultural certainty (which postmodernists have isolated as the defining characteristic of our time) is nothing new. In fact, England has been suffering from the disappearance of a solid, stable reality for at least 150 years. As England dispersed its Gothic cathedrals, cricket fields, imperial maps, costumed bodies, and country houses across the surface of the globe, it found that these spaces were altered by the colonial subjects who came into contact with them.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great ideas of space and ruin.