Like its predecessor in the Writing Wales in English series, Stephen Knight’s A Hundred Years of Fiction, Kirsti Bohata’s Postcolonialism Revisited deploys critical paradigms from contemporary postcolonial theory to open up new perspectives on Wales’s Anglophone literature. Regular readers of Welsh literary journals will be aware that this potentially controversial territory; Bohata is perhaps wise to begin her discussion by enumerating possible objections, from postcolonial theorists as well as those involved in the study of Welsh writing in English, to the whole notion of a ‘postcolonial’ Wales.
As Bohata acknowledges, Wales is geographically contiguous with England; it had already in political terms, ceased to be a country by the time of the great European ‘discoveries’ of the sixteenth century; and Welsh people were themselves complicit in acts of colonial oppression, as active participants within the British Empire. Nevertheless, she insists, Welsh writing continues ‘to invite a postcolonial consideration, bearing witness, as it does, “to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social [and cultural] authority within the modern world order”’ (the quotation belongs to that doyen of postcolonial theory, Homi Bhabha).
Furthermore, she argues, it is precisely Wales’s problematic positioning within postcolonial debate – its refusal to conform to a ‘linear model of conquest, colonization, resistance, independence and post-coloniality’ – that challenges homogenizing tendencies within postcolonial discourse and helps to deconstruct the simplistic binary opposition of colonizer/colonized.
Connections between colonial discourse and other hierarchical relations
There is, of course, an obvious objection to this argument: ‘unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation’ are not unique to the experience of colonization, but could refer equally to hierarchies of class, gender and sexuality. Bohata does not explicitly address this point, but, in the first of a series of themed chapters, she does direct the reader’s attention to the myriad ways in which colonialist discourse draws upon these existing hierarchical relationships so as to justify its authority and pathologize cultural difference.
Welsh writing, Bohata argues, occupies an ambivalent position within this discourse, on the one hand participating in the production of ‘a powerful hierarchy of ethnic stereotypes’, while on the other, registering that ‘the Welsh themselves may be constructed as marginal or threatening others to an Anglocentric norm, in terms that are common to racist colonial discourse’.
Themes and structure in Postcolonialism Revisited
Other chapters adopt a similar pattern, exploring themes such as place, hybridity, alterity or language in order to substantiate Bohata’s central claim that the Welsh experience, within and yet marginal to the Anglocentric imperial metropole, both follows and subverts paradigms of postcoloniality.
Thus, the late nineteenth-century story ‘Lady Gwen’ (serialized in the bilingual periodical Cymru Fydd) is seen as disrupting common assumptions that inscribe imperialism and revolutionary nationalism, as well as feminism and national movements of all kind, within oppositional and necessarily antagonistic relationship; while a chapter on language demonstrates how Welsh writing in English complicates postcolonial paradigms of linguistic use and identification.
By highlighting the way in which Welsh writing constitutes a ‘third term’ within such ordering binary structures, Bohata advances her contention that Welshness is a necessarily hybrid formation and thus a paradigmatic case of a postcolonial culture (although she rightly retains reservations about the unfortunate biological connotations of the term ‘hybrid’).
Conclusion
This is a persuasive, illuminating and powerfully argued book. The range of writers chosen to support Bohata’s case – from the unknown author of ‘Lady Gwen’ to famous names such as R. S. Thomas, Margiad Evans, Arthur Machen and Rhys Davies – is impressive, and discussions of their work are integrated seamlessly and productively within the book’s broader concerns. Indeed, a genuinely productive engagement of theory and text is one of Postcolonialism Revisited’s key achievements, Bohata’s dialectical readings of the two rewarding the reader with a greatly enriched understanding of both.
If I have one small concern, it is with the book’s conclusion. After arguing that Christopher Meredith’s novel, Griffri, locates ‘instability, change and hybridity at the metaphorical centre of Welsh experience’ (with which I concur), Bohata concludes by drawing some more general inferences about Wales, Welshness and hybridity. Citing the critical approach of M. Wynn Thomas, she asserts that although ‘Bhabha’s “Third Space” does not resolve tensions but recognizes and valorizes them’, the discourse of hybridity can nevertheless be used to construct a bounded space (a ‘culturally productive whole’) in which cultural conflict in Wales can be ‘contained’ – a space that is presented as synonymous with ‘the nation of Wales’.
This seems a somewhat suspect position with which to conclude, conveniently resolving as it does the tensions and very real cultural differences it simultaneously claims to foreground. Moreover, it is a position that effectively leaves the defining binary opposition between Wales and England intact and unscrutinized, thereby placing – in the name of Welsh cultural unity – a de facto limit on the deconstruction of Welsh cultural formations.
This is one minor quibble, however, and in no way detracts from the overall importance of Postcolonialism Revisited, to the fields of postcolonial studies and Welsh writing in English alike.
Harri Roberts - I have an academic background in the field of literary studies and Welsh culture. After a year spent studying Welsh writing in English for ...
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