Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue

By Yumna Siddiqi

Focusing on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century stories of detection, policing, and espionage by British and South Asian writers, Yumna Siddiqi presents an original and compelling exploration of the cultural anxieties created by imperialism. She suggests that while colonial writers use narratives of intrigue to endorse imperial rule, postcolonial writers turn the generic conventions and topography of the fiction of intrigue on its head, launching a critique of imperial power that makes the repressive and emancipatory impulses of postcolonial modernity visible.

Siddiqi devotes the first part of her book to the colonial fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan, in which the British regime's preoccupation with maintaining power found its voice. The rationalization of difference, pronouncedly expressed through the genre's strategies of representation and narrative resolution, helped to reinforce domination and, in some cases, allay fears concerning the loss of colonial power.

In the second part, Siddiqi argues that late twentieth-century South Asian writers also underscore the state's insecurities, but unlike British imperial writers, they take a critical view of the state's authoritarian tendencies. Such writers as Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie use the conventions of detective and spy fiction in creative ways to explore the coercive actions of the postcolonial state and the power dynamics of a postcolonial New Empire.

Drawing on the work of leading theorists of imperialism such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and the Subaltern Studies historians, Siddiqi reveals how British writers express the anxious workings of a will to maintain imperial power in their writing. She also illuminates the ways South Asian writers portray the paradoxes of postcolonial modernity and trace the ruses and uses of reason in a world where the modern marks a horizon not only of hope but also of economic, military, and ecological disaster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9780231510868

Book preview

ANXIETIES OF EMPIRE

and the

FICTION OF INTRIGUE

ANXIETIES OF EMPIRE

and the

FICTION OF INTRIGUE

Yumna Siddiqi

Columbia University Press   New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51086-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Siddiqi, Yumna.

Anxieties of empire and the fiction of intrigue / Yumna Siddiqi.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-13808-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51086-8 (electronic)

1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. English fiction—South Asian authors—History and criticism. 4. Intrigue in literature. 5. Espionage in literature. 6. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—20th century. 8. Imperialism in literature. 9. Postcolonialism in literature. 10. Anxiety in literature. I. Title.

PR861.S53    2008

823’.809358—dc22

2007006785

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For my parents Asiya and Obaid Siddiqi with all my love

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

1

Colonial Anxieties and the Fiction of Intrigue

2

Imperial Intrigue in an English Country House

3

Sherlock Holmes and the Cesspool of Empire: The Return of the Repressed

4

The Fiction of Counterinsurgency

5

Intermezzo: Postcolonial Modernity and the Fiction of Intrigue

6

Police and Postcolonial Rationality in Amitav Ghosh’s

The Circle of Reason

7

Deep in Blood: Roy, Rushdie, and the Representation of State Violence in India

8

The Unhistorical Dead: Violence, History, and Narrative in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Conclusion

Power Smashes Into Private Lives: Cultural Politics in the New Empire

NOTES

INDEX

Acknowledgments

So many friends, teachers, colleagues, and members of my family have helped me travel the long journey from the inception of this book as a Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University to its publication that it is impossible to do justice to them all, but I’d particularly like to thank the following:

I was remarkably fortunate to have in my dissertation director, Edward Said, an extraordinary scholar, public intellectual, and teacher, and I am deeply sorry that he is not alive to see this book in print. The other members of my dissertation committee at Columbia University, John Archer and Steven Marcus, have also been not only my readers but also my models as scholars and teachers, and I am happy to be able to acknowledge my debt to them. I would like to give a special thanks to my colleague, mentor, and dear friend John Elder, who has helped me continue to grow and learn in the last six years at Middlebury; and to Jay Parini, whose careful reading of and unwavering support for this book have helped me see it through.

Thanks also to my other colleagues and friends at Middlebury College, especially Cates Baldridge, John Bertolini, Timothy Billings, Dan Brayton, Alison Byerly, Natasha Chang, Rob Cohen, Claudio Medeiros, Sujata Moorti, Guntram Herb, Antonia Losano, William Poulin-Deltour, Michael Sheridan, and Marion Wells for their encouragement, comments, and suggestions. Rob Nixon and Eileen Gillooly also read early versions of the manuscript at Columbia University, as did Russ McDonald, Mary Ellis Gibson, and Jennifer Keith at UNCG.

At Columbia University, I was lucky to have a cohort of talented scholars and friends, and would particularly like to express my gratitude to Pat Cahill, Joe Cleary, Jon Karp, and Lisa Makman, and to members of the Postcolonial Collective, and the Cultural Studies dissertation writing group.

I hugely appreciate the interest, critical comments, and conviviality of my friends Hosam Aboul-Ela, Amy Carroll (who helped me think through the last chapter), David Clifford, Sarah Morgan, Shobhana Narasimhan, Kunal Parker, Gautam Premnath, Subir Sinha, Steve Striffler, Sanjay Tikku, Rashmi Varma, and Anne Waters. Thanks also to my friends and intellectual comrades in Montreal, Alia Al-Saji, Lisa Barg, Anne Bourlioux, Katie Coughlin, Jill Didur, Sharon Hayashi, Rosanna Maule, Anne McKnight, and Norma Rantisi.

One of the happenstances of being a migrant is that one adopts family in different parts of the world, and I would like to thank the many members of mine, who include Val Arnold-Forster, Lorna Mitchison, Av Mitchison, Will White, Kalpana White, Daya Varma, and Shree Mulay. A big thanks also to Peggy Sax for helping me stay sane and happy.

Thanks to John Tallmadge for his terrific editorial guidance and critical comments throughout the revision process. I am also grateful to the team who worked at and with Columbia University Press, Kay Banning, Jennifer Crewe, Lisa Hamm, Leslie Kriesel, William Meyers, Tom Pitoniak, Juree Sondker, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript.

An enormous thanks finally to Asiya, Obaid, Imran, Kaleem, and Diba Siddiqi, and to Imrana Qadeer, Jyotsna Dhawan, and the rest of my extended family, for their constant love and support.

Yumna Siddiqi

Middlebury, December 2007

Introduction

In this book, I explore the ways in which Empire is troubled by anxieties about its own security. I investigate how these anxieties are expressed in the fiction of intrigue—fiction that foregrounds a threat to the social and political order—and particularly in detective and spy fiction. Fiction of intrigue gives voice to concerns about imperial mastery in especially pronounced ways. It responds to and in some cases partly allays these concerns through strategies of representation and narrative resolution that are characteristic of this genre. Empire serves as an umbrella term for the different forms of Western hegemony over the rest of the world, be it in political and military rule over an alien territory and the direct exploitation of its resources, or in the exercise of economic and cultural power in a more indirect way, through the flows of capital, goods, information, and people. To examine the nature of Empire in more specific terms, this book focuses on colonial British fiction and postcolonial fiction from South Asia.

Colonial fiction of intrigue is set in a period when Britain exerted force in more or less overt ways through a range of institutions and practices: the army, the civil service, the police, revenue collection, law and the courts, educational institutions, to name but some. The colonial regime used these institutions and practices to produce knowledge that made the so-called natives transparent and governable. Bernard Cohn writes that the imperative to classify, categorize, and bound the vast social world that was India so that it could be controlled … shaped the ‘investigative modalities’ devised by the British to collect the facts.¹ Imperial writers take as their starting point the view that Britain’s then control over her imperial territories is entirely a good thing; they portray threats to the colonial order as problems to be solved by putting other investigative modalities, those of the detective and the spy, into play. Fiction of intrigue, in emphasizing a quest for knowledge and intelligence in the face of a disturbance of order, proposes a particular way of looking at the imperial world. Like imperial romances, imperial detective and spy fictions are cast as stories of adventure. However, unlike imperial romances, detective and spy stories do not represent the colonial world as enjoyably picturesque.² Rather, such fiction frames the imperial world as permeated with violence and intrigue; it emphasizes the mysteriousness of the Other. The protagonist’s quest is not for wealth or excitement, or at least not for these alone; his ultimate aim is to secure order and intelligibility.³

Such a preoccupation with order and intelligibility continues to shape the West’s view of the former colonial territories.⁴ When I began this book, the link between discourses of police, detection, and imperialism in literature piqued my interest; yet at the time the exercise seemed somewhat academic. Then followed the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Now, anxieties about law and order, crime, police, and detection predominate in Western discussions of the Third World; one can say with little exaggeration that terrorism is the defining concern of the moment. Detective and spy fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries quite strikingly anticipates contemporary metropolitan expressions of anxiety about social, political, and economic instability in former colonial territories, and current concern with making the postcolonial world an object of knowledge and control echoes that fiction’s cadences.

This will to police also marks the workings of postcolonial states. Though the postcolonial fiction of intrigue that I examine is set in a period well after formal decolonization, this era has been shaped by the historical legacy of colonialism and the forces of new forms of Empire. The view that decolonization marks not a complete end to colonial relationships, especially economic ones, but merely a recasting of them, was first put forward by Marxist anti-imperialists, perhaps most trenchantly by Kwame Nkrumah, who coined the term neocolonial to describe this continuing subordination. Contemporary Marxist thinkers, analyzing the current era of globalization, argue that the new imperialism has still to be understood as part of the logic of capitalism.⁵ More postmodern thinkers claim that the current era of globalization marks a new form of Empire, one that is deterritorialized and decentered, is characterized by new forms of sovereignty, and has generated new forms of resistance.⁶ The postcolonial writers I discuss directly address the cultural and political circumstances of Empire as we know it now. They consider the ways in which power operates through a range of material structures and modes of knowledge. These writers also point to the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity and new forms of political control. They express the paradoxes of postcolonial modernity and trace the ruses and uses of reason in a world where the modern marks the horizon of hope as well as of economic, military, and ecological disaster.

Broadly speaking, I set out in this book to explore the relationship between narrative and power as it operates in the context of Empire. In the first part of the book, I probe what fiction of intrigue reveals about the discursive and material elements of Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the anxieties to which it points. In the second, I consider how fiction of intrigue serves the ideological interests of Empire by allaying these anxieties. This part of the book focuses on contemporary fiction in a persistent yet changing Empire—the New Empire. Here I argue that postcolonial fiction of intrigue takes a more critical view of the state’s anxieties and the will to police that dominates this new era of Empire. I show how the current, global Empire marks and transforms fiction of intrigue, creating a demand for new modes of reading. Finally, I ask whether an analysis of fiction of intrigue in relation to the New Empire requires a rethinking of aspects of postcolonial theory. In other words, what are the implications, if any, of this exploration for the field of postcolonial studies?

It should be clear from this brief sketch that two threads tie the halves of this book together, one generic and the other historical. Both parts of this study focus on the genre of intrigue. The first part considers stories of intrigue that were written by Englishmen who were champions of the British Empire at its pinnacle. It looks at detective and spy fiction obliquely, from the angle of imperial civilization and its discontents. It is motivated by two interlocking queries: what happens to detective and spy fiction when it takes as its subject matter the imperial world; and what happens to imperial discourse when it takes the form of detective and spy fiction. The second part examines books by South Asian writers who set their novels of intrigue in societies that have liberated themselves from formal imperial control but that have also inherited the institutions and practices of imperial regimes. These postcolonial writers use narratives of intrigue to investigate the legacies of imperial occupation, as well as to explore postcolonial societies in an era of an emergent global Empire. They make critical use of the genre of intrigue, and interrogate the repressive aspects of postcolonial institutions and cultural practices. In this respect, the postcolonial writers I examine are interested not so much in writing back to an earlier mode of imperial representation, but in scrutinizing the repressive elements of postcolonial and global manifestations of Empire in the present. The second thread that ties this study together, then, is that of Empire in its high imperial and global aspects. While this book is not a historical study of the forms of Empire, it necessarily considers the ways in which old modes of imperialism coexist with or are replaced by new ones.

This study could not have been done without the work of Edward Said, who pioneered the study of the relationship between imperialism and culture. It is difficult to overstate the significance of Said’s work for literary scholarship specifically and for the humanities and social sciences more generally. Drawing upon Foucault’s exploration of the nexus between power, discourse, and knowledge, Said critiques the discursive production of knowledge about the colonized world, and the relation between this knowledge production and the more brute exercise of economic and military power by the West. If the subject of Orientalism was the implications of such knowledge for imperial and postcolonial hegemony, then in Culture and Imperialism Said also considered the manifold responses of thinkers and artists from the postcolonial world.

Said stresses the imperial will to power that marks Orientalist and imperialist writing. The first wave of scholars of postcolonial discourse paid relatively little attention to the doubts and apprehensions voiced in colonial writing, and instead largely emphasized its triumphalist tone.⁷ They argued quite rightly that the relation of metropolis to colony is best characterized as one of domination. Accordingly, they stressed that colonial writing bolstered imperial rule by offering representations that validated such domination. Yet imperial power was exercised neither seamlessly nor securely. As the frequent use of the phrase going native suggests, imperial hegemony and imperial identity were often precarious. This instability stemmed from the contradictions and tensions that ran through imperial formations. Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper have argued, Colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent. Against the power which they projected across the globe and against their claim to racial, cultural, or technological domination, closer investigation reveals competing agendas for using power, competing strategies for maintaining control, and doubts about the legitimacy of the venture.⁸ And if power was successfully held, the possibility of its loss always attended its possession.⁹ Even when power was maintained, the possible effect of imperialism on national culture was a source of uneasiness, as the writing of the period reveals. Recent scholars have noted the ambivalence of colonial discourse. Indeed, Said too implicitly acknowledges the nexus of fantasies and fears that underpin representations of the Orient. Homi Bhabha foregrounds this ambivalence, which he locates not so much in the person of the colonizer as in the process of colonial utterance. My study, in focusing on fiction with an eye to the imperial anxieties and tensions it expresses, is very much part of a second wave of postcolonial literary scholarship.¹⁰

In Culture and Imperialism, Said examines the ways in which postcolonial writers situate themselves vis-à-vis the metropole, that is, the metropolitan center of the British Empire—England, or more narrowly, London—in what he calls the voyage in.¹¹ He emphasizes the dialogic relationship between the cultural discourse of the colonized and that of the metropole. He observes that those who write from the vantage point of colonized subjects neither reproduce metropolitan discourse uncritically nor are completely detached from it; rather, writers from the periphery have a complex, angular relationship to metropolitan culture. After all, the postcolonial societies from which these writers come were not created ex nihilo; they are indelibly marked by the experience of colonial rule. The historical continuities between imperial and postcolonial societies are particularly pronounced in the domain of the state. Partha Chatterjee argues with respect to British India that the colonial state took as its ostensible project the improvement of India; this was Britain’s civilizing mission.¹² When Indian nationalists assumed power, they argued that the colonial regime’s methods of improvement had not promoted the full and efficacious growth of the nation and her people, but had in fact stunted this growth. Nationalists believed that it was their mandate to use the Indian state as a vehicle for modes of development that were truly in the interest of Indians. They put in place a series of ambitious five-year plans to pursue true national development.

At the same time, they inherited the well-developed repressive apparatuses of the state, using these to control the citizenry. Hamza Alavi, one of the first scholars to use the term postcolonial, offers a groundbreaking discussion of the exaggerated development of the military-bureaucratic apparatuses:

[The metropolitan bourgeoisie’s] task in the colony is not merely to replicate the superstructure of the state which it had established in the metropolitan country itself. Additionally, it has to create separate apparatus through which it can exercise dominion over all the indigenous social classes in the colony…. The colonial state is therefore equipped with a powerful bureaucratic-military apparatus and mechanisms of government which enable it through its routine operations to subordinate the native social classes. The postcolonial society inherits that overdeveloped apparatus of state and its institutionalized practices through which the operations of the indigenous social classes are regulated and controlled.¹³

Alavi argues that the metropolitan bourgeoisie that sets up the colonial state does not simply introduce the structures of its state, but rather has to establish apparatuses to subordinate all the social classes in the colony. Alavi’s astute analysis shows how various social classes—the indigenous bourgeoisie, the metropolitan neocolonialist bourgeoisie, and the landed classes—collude and compete to produce a relatively autonomous bureaucratic military state structure, one that tends to be excessively large and powerful. These apparatuses are passed on more or less intact to the postcolonial state.

Postcolonial novels of intrigue foreground the persistence of an overblown military-bureaucratic state in the postindependence era. They underscore the abuses of power by the government and its police structures. Whereas colonial writers endorse the imperial vision of law and order, the postcolonial novelists on whom I focus use the genre of intrigue to critique the repressive mechanisms of the postcolonial state. Thus, broadly speaking, I move from a course of reading that attempts to discern the ideological currents and tensions in colonial texts, to a strategy of reading that positions postcolonial writers as participants in, rather than objects of, ideological critique.

Postcolonial novelists also explore the repressive aspects of the new global Empire, but often in more tentative ways, perhaps because the contours of this Empire are only now becoming visible and there is little consensus on how to understand it. When the United Nations General Assembly declared in 1960 the right to self-determination of all colonial countries and peoples, it articulated a principle that underpinned the decolonization of much of Africa and Asia after World War II; this decolonization of British territories continued with the independence of Zimbabwe in 1980; Belize, Antigua, and Barbados in 1981; St. Kitts and Nevis in 1983; and the reversion of Hong Kong to China in 1997. At the end of the twentieth century, the decolonization of British territories seemed a fait accompli. The question was whether imperialism had taken new forms and was now achieved by economic and financial domination. Yet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s support for the United States–led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the touting of the principle of preemption, the question of whether imperialism is an active and accepted practice today has a new urgency. On this global stage, the United States is clearly the dominant imperial power, with Britain taking on the role of supporting cast. It is debatable whether Western powers have reverted to old forms of imperialism, or whether we have a new species of imperialism altogether, one in which the globalized empire of capital is buttressed by new forms of repression. To those who see modern forms of Empire as a radical departure from the old, with novel forms of decentered and deterritorializing sovereignty, one is inclined to point out that the recent turn to violent military occupation in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon (by Israel, but with the tacit backing of the United States and the United Kingdom), is entirely in the vein of classic nineteenth-century imperial domination.

In the first part of the book, I focus principally on stories of intrigue by Arthur Conan Doyle. At first glance, Doyle does not appear to write about imperialism other than tangentially. It is only when one examines his fiction specifically through a postcolonial lens—that is, with a perspective informed by the body of criticism and theory about the relationship between culture and imperialism that emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century—that one discerns that it is significantly marked by the experience of imperialism. The stories repeatedly figure characters from different parts of the British Empire, characters who pose a threat to order within England. Given that the period in which the stories were written and are set was one of aggressive imperial expansion, it is hardly remarkable that Empire should be represented as obtruding upon metropolitan space.¹⁴ What is more interesting is that in Conan Doyle’s mysteries, the development of plot, and the uncovering of a plot which is the moment of detective fiction, frequently occurs within an imperial framework such that different kinds of problems are imaginatively mapped onto different parts of the imperial world: Australia, India, Africa, and South America (which was subject to an informal imperialism). Read in this way, Conan Doyle’s stories yield a veritable imaginative topography of Empire.

To throw the imperial subplots of Doyle’s stories into relief especially sharply, and to explore the imperial dimensions of these subplots more fully, I read Doyle’s stories alongside fiction by writers who more obviously contend with imperial terrain: Wilkie Collins, Rudyard Kipling, and John Buchan. I have chosen to concentrate on these writers for a number of reasons. First, they are canonical minor writers who have had a wide and lasting audience and cultural significance. Second, they all present fictions of intrigue in which Empire plays an important if obscure part. Third, Doyle, Kipling, and Buchan in their public lives were themselves associated with Empire, and their writing served imperial interests. This is not to say that their stories uniformly endorse imperial rule; on the contrary, they often reveal the contradictions of Empire, as I explicitly argue. But they were champions of Empire, and one must read their stories against the grain to discover anxieties about the shortcomings and dangers of imperial rule. Their fictional accounts of detection and spying not only reveal anxieties about Empire, but also tend to allay them through narratives that delineate and enact a process of ordering. Thus I argue that their writing attempts to resolve ideologically the anxieties generated by administrative policing characteristic of Empire in both its British colonial and its global manifestations.

The second part of the book focuses on contemporary postcolonial fiction by South Asian writers who refashion the genre of intrigue to interrogate the political anxieties of the present. The writers I discuss, Amitav Ghosh, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Michael Ondaatje, all use literary fiction to reflect critically on the large questions that face postcolonial societies: the legacy of colonialism, the nature of postcolonial identity, the significance of religion and caste, the character of political violence, and the implications of globalization and diaspora. In their novels, these writers explore the problems of economic hardship, caste and gender oppression, ethnic and communal violence, and environmental degradation. By casting their novels as stories of intrigue, they underscore the forms of police that operate in different domains of cultural, social, political, and economic life. They throw into relief both the repressive and emancipatory agendas of the postcolonial state.

The interpretive method that I follow is eclectic. Pierre Macherey’s notion of symptomatic reading—by which he means a critical attention to textual gaps, silences, and tensions that reveal the presence of ideological matter that has been transformed through the labor of literary production—is useful in teasing out the underlying currents expressed in fiction of intrigue.¹⁵ Macherey argues that the critic does not bring to light the meaning of a text that is obscure; rather, he or she produces a second-order text that is related to but discursively different from the literary work. In my symptomatic readings, I attempt to probe the silences and gaps in Conan Doyle’s and Buchan’s stories to write an account of some of the anxieties that trouble colonial texts. At the same time, as I show, in a postcolonial context of ethnic violence in which polities have been shattered, symptomatic reading can itself be problematic. The second-order text that the detective—and the critic—produces has its own ideological coloring. Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, reflecting upon the challenges that a forensic scientist faces when thrust in the theater of political violence, repeatedly asserts, In diagnosing a vascular injury, a high index of suspicion is necessary. The critic must be similarly vigilant, probing the tissue of the text with some sensitivity to the cultural and political traumas whose imprint it bears. The critic’s narrative produces no simple truth either about this text or the cultural conflicts it mediates; rather, it is, at its best, a reflexive second-order narrative that represents these traumas and conflicts in a different language.

Carlo Ginzburg’s conjectural paradigm is another interpretive model that I draw upon. While Macherey focuses on literary texts, and attributes an irreducible specificity to the domain of the aesthetic, Ginzburg turns his attention to historical interpretation. Ginzburg argues that the diagnostic technique of the physician and the investigative mode of the detective both exemplify what he calls the conjectural paradigm, a paradigm that the historian shares. The conjectural paradigm involves the intuitive connection of clues and traces to produce knowledge that is indirect, presumptive. Such an approach focuses on the individual and the particular and is not scientific in the conventional sense, since it cannot be generalized or systematized. Nor is it scientific in Macherey’s sense of wearing on its sleeve the rules by which it constitutes knowledge. Ginzburg argues, however, for its flexible rigor.¹⁶ Its role in capillary forms of control notwithstanding—Ginzburg gives the example of a British administrator of a district of Bengal, William Herschel, who laid the ground for fingerprinting when he observed the local practice of using the imprints of dirty fingers to identify individuals—the conjectural paradigm can become a device to dissolve the ideological clouds which increasingly obscure such a complex social structure as capitalism—and, I would argue, imperialism.¹⁷ To tease out the unsaid of the novels and to elaborate on the said, I undertake a combination of symptomatic reading and conjectural analysis.

Such an approach to interpretation is especially apposite when one tries to make sense of the social experience and representation of subaltern peoples. In Notes on Italian History, Antonio Gramsci discusses the political situation of what he identifies as subaltern groups—subordinated groups that exist outside the aegis of the state and have a fragmented and episodic history by virtue of their marginal position. The Subaltern Studies historians have taken up Gramsci’s analysis to chart a subaltern historiography, one that focuses on the marginal and subordinate: women, peasants, tribal peoples, and so on. While both Gramsci and his adherents address their remarks to the study of subordinate groups, their choice of terminology and their comments suggest ways to reconceive the nature of the dominant imperial formation. As a noun, subaltern can be used to denote a person (or thing) of inferior rank or status; a subordinate; occasionally a subaltern genus; a subordinate character in a book. This is the definition invoked by Ranajit Guha and his colleagues in the Subaltern Studies series. However, the word can also be, and commonly is, used to refer to an officer in the army of junior rank.¹⁸ A subaltern officer is of a subordinate rank yet is an integral part of one element of the dominant group—the military.¹⁹ It is worth considering whether, in the colonial context, members of the dominant formation shared the experience of subalternity. How, for example, would one characterize the rebellious soldiers of 1857? Given that Britain’s imperial armies and administrations were to a large extent peopled by non-Europeans, a racially defined subalternity inhered in the very core of imperial regimes.²⁰ While Guha speaks here of indigenous groups, a similar analysis can be made of imperial regimes. Certain groups occupied a subordinate and ambiguous position in the political structure of Empire. In fact, natives too were positioned in contradictory ways as colonial subjects. Such was the case of the Indian subalterns who were forced to choose loyalties during the period of the Indian Revolt. Characters from subaltern groups appear frequently in colonial fiction. The process of conjectural reading is particularly suited to exploring the social situation of such subaltern groups because their place in the social fabric is often obscure and must be detected through their traces and by piecing together fragments of information.

The postcolonial novels that I discuss are also marked by ideological tensions and fissures, as my reading of Anil’s Ghost in the last chapter suggests. On the whole, though, the writers of these postcolonial novels take a consciously critical stance toward Empire and its cultural and social implications. The postcolonial novels in question mount this criticism by tracing the activity of what Fredric Jameson calls the social detective. In the essay Totality as Conspiracy, Jameson explores the ways in which contemporary films express the world system itself.²¹ He focuses especially on the ‘conspiratorial text,’ which, whatever messages it emits or implies, may also be taken to constitute an unconscious, collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us in a late twentieth century whose abominations are heightened by their concealment and their bureaucratic impersonality.²² The social detective navigates these landscapes and attempts to discover these secret forces. Often the detective indicts an entire collectivity for its involvement in a crime or a conspiracy. Such representations are most frequently found in that older moment of a still national culture in which the function of literature includes what I have elsewhere called national allegorization, providing individual narrative representations through which the national destiny can be fantasized.²³ According to Jameson, narratives of social detection often are responses to the corrosive effects of modernity on a traditional social and moral order; they are mobilized in the service of a conservative cultural critique. Consequently,

they are less serviceable when secularization and modernization have long since become facts of daily life—not to speak of what obtains when the new multinational organization of late capitalism problematizes the framework of the nation state along with the national cultural forms specific to it (like this allegorical one). This form, therefore, in which an individual somehow confronts crime and scandal of collective dimensions and consequences, cannot be transferred to the representations of global postmodernity without deep internal and structural modifications.

Jameson’s comments are extremely suggestive in relation to the postcolonial novels of intrigue that I examine here. These novels engage precisely in a critique of the social order, but not necessarily in a conservative way. Rather, they mount a critique of both modern and traditional institutions. In these novels, the narrative follows a process of social detection, sometimes localized in a single character, at others in a more dispersed way. The protagonist, who attempts to understand the mysterious, possibly criminal events around him or her, eventually perceives the nefarious underbelly of social and political institutions. Such a narrative of social detection becomes a way of commenting on the corruption of society as a whole, and not just of individuals. Postcolonial fiction of intrigue underscores the secret abuses of power by the government and elites. As Jameson predicts, fiction of intrigue, essentially a conservative form, itself undergoes changes as it explores the contradictions of postcolonial modernity.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

The chapters of this book move sequentially from a consideration of detection inside the metropole, to a discussion of spying beyond the metropole in the field of Empire, and then to an examination of intrigues set in postcolonial societies. Part 1 of this book is about late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century fiction of intrigue.

In chapter 1, I address the prevalence and the significance of anxieties of Empire. I also discuss the importance of popular fiction in expressing and shaping attitudes toward British imperialism around the beginning of the twentieth century. I then sketch the historical and theoretical context for a study of detective and spy fictionof that era, and explore the literary fashioning of the detective and the spy in relation to anxieties of Empire.

In chapter 2, I discuss a little-known but important short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Mystery of Uncle Jeremy’s Household. Doyle weaves into the fabric of this story of intrigue a number of the themes and concerns that I focus on in this book: ethnography, anxieties about miscegenation and hybrid identity, education, colonial desire, the return of colonial subjects from Empire to the metropole, and insurgency against British rule. At the heart of the mystery is Miss Warrender, a governess of mixed heritage who has traveled to England from India. Her identity and character raise questions about the efficacy of colonial governmentality, and the need for the proper education of colonial subjects. The story links colonial anthropology, a knowledge of the habits and customs of native subjects, directly to the project of colonial rule.

In chapter 3, I discuss a number of Doyle’s detective stories in which colonial subjects return to England, where they are at the center of a mystery or crime. I attempt to unpack the cultural significance of the figure of the returned colonial in fiction of intrigue. These characters unsettle the social fabric when they appear, exposing social tensions and contradictions by their presence.