25 research outputs found
āSavage times come againā : Morel, Wells, and the African Soldier, c.1885-1920
The African soldier trained in western combat was a figure of fear and revulsion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My article examines representations of African soldiers in nonfictional writings by E.D. Morel about the Congo Free State (1885-1908), the same authorās reportage on African troops in post-First World War Germany, and H.G. Wellsās speculative fiction When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, 1910). In each text racist and anti-colonialist discourses converge in representing the African soldier as the henchman of corrupt imperialism. His alleged propensity for taboo crimes of cannibalism and rape are conceived as threats to white safety and indeed supremacy. By tracing Wellsās connections to the Congo reform campaign and situating his novel between two phases of Morelās writing career, I interpret When the Sleeper Wakes as neither simply a reflection of past events in Africa or as a prediction of future ones in Europe. It is rather a transcultural text which reveals the impact of European culture upon the āCongo atrocitiesā, and the inscription of this controversy upon European popular cultural forms and social debates
Hosts and hostages: Mass immigration and the power of hospitality in post-war British and Caribbean literature
This article examines the challenge to colonialist centre-periphery relations in post-war novels by white British and Caribbean writers. Concentrating on the relationship between political debates surrounding mass immigration and the marginalization of non-white migrants within British communities, I analyse texts that depict the threshold of the home as the politicized site of racial tension, namely Sam Selvonās The Lonely Londoners (1956), V.S. Naipaulās The Mimic Men (1967), Alan Sillitoeās Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and Anthony Burgessās The Right to an Answer (1960). In varying ways, these texts depict the durability of centre-periphery relations at local levels through the informal segregation of the colonizer and the colonized. In doing so they point to what Jacques Derrida has outlined, in Of Hospitality (2000), as the power relationship inherent in policies of immigration, whereby the host-nation remains in control of the conditions upon which hospitality rests