Strange Relations: The Evangelical and Anthropological Roots of Imperial Anxiety

Abstract

In their discussion of the ironies of Englishness, both Ian Baucom (1999) and Simon Gikandi (1996) trace a historical trajectory that culminates in the twentieth century. Granting that “it has never been clear where the identity between colonizer and colonized ends and the difference between them begins,” as Gikandi puts it, both critics characterize postcolonial culture as the moment in which the overlap reaches its clearest expression (2). Gikandi speculates that the “loss of empire has forced the imagined community [of Englishness] to unravel” in a particularly visible way (31). From this perspective, Victorian culture might be misunderstood as a prefatory moment during which the nation imagined itself as a ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ set in opposition to dark-skinned colonial othemess.¹ The ‘Englishness of the past’, as Robert Young (1995) points out, “is often represented in terms of fixity, of certainty, centredness, homogeneity, as something unproblematically identical with itself” (2). Neither Gikandi nor Baucom promotes this misunderstanding, but the extent to which Victorian culture anxiously perceived forms of colonial “otherness” built into the framework of English identity requires further study.