Literary Studies

Clare Bradford is an Associate Professor in Literary and Communication Studies at Deakin University. She writes from within her discipline, and addresses other academics. Reading Race, despite its broad title, is principally a discussion of forms of racism that the author identifies in books published in colonial times, compared with contemporary examples.

In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, much of the action occurs amongst the migrant clientele of the Hot Wax Club. The club is decorated with waxworks of England’s notable but unacknowledged migrant ancestors: Mary Seacole, Ignatius Sancho and Grace Jones, among others. As Leela Gandhi points out in her discussion of Rushdie’s novel, we are encouraged to read the Hot Wax clubbers as historians disinterring the nation’s past to reveal a secret history of immigration, a past which is used strategically to reshape understandings of contemporary Britain. The project of this book is similar. What happens when we examine representations of England and Englishness by writers who are travellers, émigrés and immigrants from its diaspora?

Samuel Johnson once wilfully said, ‘Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.’ One can understand Johnson’s sentiment. Talk about will can be interminable. If we feel our will to be free, does it matter if it really is? Right now, I’m willing myself to write this review, instead of having dessert or watching Big Brother (‘Will to Power in Big Brother: Or, Are You Smirking at Me?’ would make an interesting paper). But my will is weak. I’ve just returned from making a cup of tea. Writers – like everybody else – are notoriously good at finding distractions. But what does it mean to say that my will is ‘weak’? How much am I willing my writing of this review, and how much am I forced to write it? Is writing determined by economics (need for money), psychology (desire to see one’s name in print), or class (aspirations learned through upbringing and education)? And yet I’m free, am I not, to pass my own judgment on the book? Sooner or later, we give up and go to the pub with Dr Johnson.

Nothing divides people as much as the idea that history is a text and, in many cases, a fiction. It’s the sort of notion – more or less accepted by academics in the Humanities – that really annoys ‘among the barbarians’ public intellectuals. Point out that history is written by the victors, that much of what we think of as gospel was written decades after the event from secondary sources (the Gospels, for example), and that the bulk of tradition, from Scots tartan to Christmas, is a nineteenth-century confection, and their anger becomes tinged with panic. It’s vertigo, but one of time rather than space – the sudden realisation that you are standing on nothing but the present, with the texts and living witnesses (whose memories are texts) inhering in the present.

Peter Timms’s Making Nature is a delight. I found it especially enjoyable because I have been reading massively for my next book, so it was a remarkable break to take six contemplative walks with Timms and the many who accompany him, not in the flesh but in the word: Rousseau, Augustine, Petrarch, Edmund Burke, Kant, and a host of others, instructing, disrupting, agreeing.

The problems that have bedevilled Australian literary criticism and literary history over the last twenty years have been worldwide. Histories, even quite short ones, now have to be written polyphonically, by committees of dozens of contributors. It is taken for granted that no single person could cover the whole field and the variety of critical perspectives, movements, genres, institutions and ideologies involved. One of the recurrent phrases of recent years has been ‘pushing the boundaries’; but histories, surveys, theses, articles all depend on demarcation lines. That is why the notion of a ‘canon’ has been useful, though, of course, a canon needs to be constantly questioned and revised so as not to become stagnant and restrictive.