Memories of empire: The Empire Exhibition in Andrea Levy’s Small Island and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist

Abstract

Two novels from the early 2000s set key scenes at the Empire Exhibition in London in 1924: Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002) and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004). In both novels, the Exhibition is clearly intended to enshrine in the collective memory of British citizens a particular, museum-like vision of Britain’s history with its colonies. In part, the imperial propaganda generated by the exhibition is born out of England’s interwar anxiety about the looming breakup of its empire. It is ironic then that in both cases, the exhibits seem to evoke a very different reaction in the characters who encounter them: the presence of real people — specifically real Africans — undermines the tightly ordered fixity of the museum display. Instead it becomes another kind of memory site: messy and unpredictable, with the constant potential to expose the superficiality of colonial stereotypes and bear witness to more jagged and less flattering histories. Indeed, the same anxieties that create the need for stable memories of the past also lead to cracks in the structures of colonial domination, giving characters space to recreate their identities and their collective memories.

Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island (2004) ¹ is mostly set during and after World War II, but the novel begins with a prologue set in 1924: the character Queenie, then a little girl, goes on a visit with her family and their servants to Wembley in North London to visit the Empire Exhibition, which King George V had described as “the whole Empire in little” (2). There she encounters many of the 56 countries represented through colonial stereotypes and essences: “the different woods of Burma […] the big-game trophies of Malaya […] the sugar of Barbados […] the chocolate of Grenada”, and apples from Australia (3). In the simulacrum of an African village, Queenie sees in a hut on a dirt floor “a woman with skin as black as the ink that filled the inkwell in my school desk. A shadow come to life” (4). Graham, one of the servants charged with Queenie’s care, says disparagingly of the woman that “She can’t understand what I’m saying. […] They’re not civilised. They only understand drums” (5). As Anna Grmelová says, Levy shows us this scene to alert us “to a shared history of colonialism and to anticipate some of the crude racial stereotypes […] which await the hybrid Jamaican couple in London later on” (Grmelová, 2010: 78). ² The fact that the stereotyped “essence” of each colony is so often represented by a trade good (lumber, sugar, chocolate, apples) also points to the Empire Exhibition’s commodification of ethnicity and its repression of colonial history beneath a narrative of the economic and cultural benefits of imperialism. Soon, though, these stereotypes are disrupted by the speaking of “the shadow”: when the servants push Queenie towards a big African man with taunts of “kiss him, kiss him”, the black man asks in clear, polite, and dignified English, “Perhaps we could shake hands instead?”, and “Graham’s smile fell off his face” (Levy, 2004: 5). This incident is referred to only once again in the novel, but the role of this prologue in “fram[ing] the whole novel” (Lima, 2005: 77) goes a long way towards explaining Queenie’s open-minded racial attitudes later in life, at least in comparison to virtually every other white British character in the book. As Lima puts it, Queenie and other characters in the book “become progressively more involved in deconstructing the official version of Englishness” (Lima, 2005: 57).

The Empire Exhibition is also given a very brief, seemingly passing treatment in another twenty-first-century book, Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002). Kunzru’s first novel is deeply immersed in intertextual conversation with such paradigmatic colonial novels as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kipling’s Kim, and Forster’s A Passage to India. The protagonist Pran Nath is conceived by an English father and an Indian mother during a flood-ravaged night in northern India; after his mother’s death he is raised by her wealthy husband until he learns he is not the boy’s real father. The young Pran is then thrust out into the streets of Agra, after which he finds himself in various demeaning roles, including becoming a prostitute named Rukhsana, and playing “Bobby”, a domestic servant to a missionary preacher in Bombay. Finally he steals the identity of Jonathan Bridgeman, a young nouveau riche Englishman who dies in his presence, and boards a ship to England. For a while Pran/Jonathan seems to find a stable identity as a protégé to the Oxford anthropology professor Henry Chapel. But that identity begins to unravel after a number of precipitating events, one of which is Jonathan’s confrontation with blackness at the Empire Exhibition. Finally his entire persona collapses while accompanying Professor Chapel on a fieldwork expedition to a fictional British African colony, where Pran eventually finds healing at the hands of an African medicine man. Thus the brief scene at the exhibition is actually a turning point in the novel, where the chameleon-like Jonathan reluctantly begins to confront the superficiality of the false identity he has invented for himself.

I initially thought to read the Empire Exhibition in these two novels as an example of what Andreas Huyssen calls “musealization”. Huyssen notes a seeming contradiction between the twentieth-century obsession with museums and memorials on the one hand, and an economy of planned disusage on the other: “memory and musealization together are called upon to provide a bulwark against obsolescence and disappearance” (Huyssen, 2003: 23), but “any secure sense of the past itself is being destabilized by our musealizing culture industry and by the media” (Huyssen, 2003: 24). Indeed, the Empire Exhibition, both in history and in these two novels, is surely in part a symptom of anxiety about the looming dissolution of the Empire. In the aftermath of several developments threatening British global hegemony and the perceived legitimacy of its empire — including the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, Gandhi’s growing influence in the Indian subcontinent, and the establishment of an independent Republic of Ireland in 1922 — it was more important than ever to give British citizens the sense, as Queenie’s father puts it to her, that “You’ve got the whole world at your feet, lass” (6). While the Empire Exhibition is not a memorial in the same strict sense that a monument to soldiers lost in war memorializes the dead, it nevertheless tells a particular history of the British Empire, a history whitewashed to cast British power as benign and legitimate.

A deeper reading of these two novels, however, suggests something else going on in these representations of the Empire Exhibition beyond propaganda and beyond freezing the past as a bulwark against the waning of empire. In both cases, something jarring and uncanny happens that undermines the effectiveness of the Exhibition as imperialist propaganda; sometimes the exhibits and pageants inadvertently reveal other pasts, buried genealogies, and repressed traumas. In Kunzru’s novel, in particular, the unruliness of the Empire Exhibition sits in clear contrast to more conventional and strictly ordered museums, such as the anthropology annexe at the Oxford University museum. This distinction is partly due to the fact that, beyond dioramas and other static displays of cultural artefacts, the Empire Exhibition features real human beings, and real people always have the potential to burst out of the essentializing frames of the museum display. ³ Thus for instance, even as the child Queenie notices the physical differences in the African man’s hair and facial features, she also notices the commonalities: the man smiled with “a perfect set of pure blinding white teeth. The inside of his mouth was pink and his face was coming closer and closer to mine. […] And I shook an African man’s hand. It was warm and slightly sweaty like anyone else’s” (5).

It also seems, though, that the very same anxieties that lead to such sites as the Empire Exhibition simultaneously generate cracks in the edifice of colonial domination, allowing the characters to create their own socio-cultural spaces where their identities and collective, diasporic memories can be renegotiated and reinvented. As Irene Pérez Fernández claims, the post-Second World War era of Small Island’s narrative present is “a crucial moment in British history and marks the beginning of present-day multicultural British society. This is a moment of social disruption and change” (Fernández, 2009: 150). The uncanny encounters at the Empire Exhibition in both novels show us the earliest glimpses of that disruption, and foreshadow the changes to come.

The Wembley British Empire Exhibition was the culmination of a series of great imperial-themed exhibitions held throughout the British dominions from as early as the 1850s, events that “combined entertainment, education, and trade fair on a spectacular scale” (MacKenzie, 1998: 97) and “were part of the more general late Victorian and Edwardian attempt to create social order by means of large-scale cultural events and institutions” (Hoffenberg, 2001: 3). The Empire Exhibition was inaugurated on St. George’s Day in April 1924, and coincided with the opening of the Football Stadium in Wembley. Each pavilion showcased the cultures and trade goods of the colonies and territories it represented, with indigenous peoples or “races in residence” demonstrating “local crafts and manufacturing techniques” against backdrops that often represented local architectural traditions (MacKenzie, 1999: 214). The exhibition as a whole also included live performances, film screenings, military parades, and a funfair with water rides. By the end of its extended run in 1925, the exhibition had attracted over 27 million visitors (MacKenzie, 1999: 214). According to the official guidebook, the purpose of the Wembley exhibition was

[t]o find, in the development and utilization of the raw materials of the Empire, new sources of Imperial wealth. To foster inter-Imperial trade and open fresh world markets for Dominion and home products. To make the different races of the British Empire better known to each other, and to demonstrate to the people of Britain the almost illimitable possibilities of the Dominions, Colonies, and Dependencies overseas. (Quoted in MacKenzie, 1998: 108)

In opening up the colonies to trade, the empire likewise commodified their cultures and rendered them as stereotypes that obscured true memories of colonial relations and a pre-colonial past. In imperial exhibitions, “individual and social memories were often anchored in the exhibition experience, participation at the shows shaping a strong sense of the past” (Hoffenberg, 2001: 12). Indeed, Hoffenberg argues that such exhibitions “were not mere mirrors of the political and social order but agents of change, creating by participation and not coercion a sense of natural order, consensus, and hierarchy” (2001: 27). Yet at least one visitor to the 1924 exhibition perceived ominous signs for the empire in the dark clouds that hung overhead during her visit. Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “Thunder at Wembley”, “They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay. Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom. […] The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins. For that is what comes of letting in the sky” (quoted in Cohen, 2004: 86).

The exhibition did spark controversy, as for example when a group of West African students wrote to complain about the depiction of Africans as cannibals, claiming that those representations “are consciously or unconsciously holding up to ridicule fellow British subjects” (quoted in Britton, 2010: 73). No doubt these complaints were well justified; in his comparative studies of world’s fairs throughout a 150 year period, Burton Benedict concludes that “Africans were subject to the most prevalent negative stereotyping of any exhibited ethnic group” (Benedict, 1994: 36–7). And as the name of the British Empire Exhibition implies, it was particularly intended as pro-imperial propaganda rather than ethnographically accurate depictions of the peoples being represented. MacKenzie tells us, for example, that the “West African building was designed as a mud-baked walled town, more appropriate to northern Nigeria than the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone” (MacKenzie, 1998: 108). Yet within the rhetoric of imperial domination were irreconcilable tensions that played out in the exhibition’s various chambers and undermined its efficacy as propaganda. In the particular case of the African displays, we find a tension between, on the one hand, images of a timeless Africa whose traditions and cultural practices are static, as if congealed in amber; and on the other hand, rhetoric of an Africa whose inhabitants, if subjected to the proper civilizing influences, could be modernized and brought to the putative level of superior Europeans.

This tension is one source of the ambivalence of the colonial mimic, as Homi Bhabha describes him: “The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha, 1994: 86). If the mimic comes to resemble the object of mimicry too closely, the civilizing mission might be seen as having succeeded, undermining the ideological justification for continued colonial dominance. Thus the colonial stereotype is deployed to ensure the “strategic failure” of the colonial subject’s appropriation of British mannerisms and mores. For example, Queenie’s father reassures her that the African man who spoke to her in flawless English must be a

chief or a prince in Africa. Evidently, when they speak English you know that they have learned to be civilized — taught English by the white man, missionaries probably. So Father told me not to worry about having shaken his hand because the African man was most likely a potentate. (6)

To assume that an ordinary African is capable of mastering the King’s English is to call into question other assumptions about the inferiority of Africans, and thus much of the rationale for colonial occupation. Later in Levy’s novel Gilbert Joseph uses this tension to his advantage, when he notes, “Politeness has always been my policy. It makes the good people of England revise what they think of you, if only for a second or two. They expect us colony men to be uncultured” (138). Gilbert’s cynicism about the stereotyped thinking of white English people is confirmed in the figure of Queenie’s husband Bernard, who wants blacks to conform to his preconceptions of them and their place: “Everyone was trying to get home after the war. […] Except these blasted coloured colonials. I’ve nothing against them in their place. But their place isn’t here” (388–9).

Such expectations result in part from the narrative of an idealized and timeless African past to which black people naturally belong — a narrative that the Empire Exhibition played into, even as the functionaries of empire were working diligently throughout the colonies to disrupt and undermine traditional African cultural practices. This contradiction reinforces Achille Mbembe’s claims about the function of archives and official memorialization. Commemoration, he says,

is part of the ritual of forgetting: one bids farewell to the desire or the willingness to repeat something. “Learning” to forget is all the easier if, on the one hand, whatever is to be forgotten passes into folklore […] and if, on the other hand, it becomes part of the universe of commodification. (Mbembe, 2002: 24)

The reality of imperial domination is consigned to the archives of official history, while a sugarcoated version of the African past is made simultaneously into both folklore and commodity through the stagecraft of the Empire Exhibition. As Jonathan Boyarin puts it, “The erection of monuments [and, I would argue, exhibits such as the one at Wembley] is a central means of shaping memory” (Boyarin, 1994: 20) — but also a means of engineering a selective forgetting.

If the Empire Exhibition served as a mechanism for disseminating racial stereotypes and whitewashing the ugly contradictions of colonial domination, why do the characters in both Levy’s and Kunzru’s novels leave the exhibition with their belief in racial stereotypes shaken and grasping for explanations? Why, for example, does Jonathan Bridgeman in The Impressionist, who has worked so hard to erase his mongrel Indian past and become the quintessential English gentleman, feel that viewing the simulation of a Fotse Village is “like staring into the toilet bowl, looking at what he has expelled from himself” (Kunzru, 2002: 367)? ⁴

The Impressionist’s answer to this question is complex, showing us two different ways in which memories are registered in collective consciousness. The first way is through various mechanisms that attempt to impose order and control over the past. The protagonist of Kunzru’s novel (at this point known as Robert or Bobby) first encounters this kind of thinking in the missionary Reverend Macfarlane’s phrenology and craniometry, which sought to categorize the “subject races of India” according to how “differences in brain size correspond exactly to degree of civilization and capacity for rational thought” (192). Later, he finds another such mechanism in the Oxford anthropology museum, which the narrator describes as

a treasure house of artifacts collected by previous anthropologists, archaeologists, and explorers. Its mahogany cases are crammed with the detritus of world culture, a dizzying array of objects formed for every kind of social use. […] To allow comparison all these things are arranged with others of their kinds, the eye soaring high above the world it surveys, able to view waves of influence, family traits, trade routes, and lines of descent. All the earth packed into a single room. All waiting for him to order it, and order himself within it. (364–5)

Indeed, as Kunzru depicts it, the early twentieth-century discipline of anthropology itself is designed specifically to enable this kind of ordering gaze, which is what Jonathan finds so attractive about it: “All the earth is available. Everything and everyone has a place. What could be better than to stand and look down over these valleys of the past?” (362).

In contrast, the second mechanism through which memories are registered in collective narratives of the past is messier, more organic, and not at all under individual viewers’ control: it is more analogous to the marks or wounds left in an individual survivor’s consciousness after a traumatic ordeal. This mechanism is evident, for instance, in the ways the past seems to inscribe itself on the landscape and the physical, built environment. The starkest example of this is Amritsar, where our protagonist finds himself a week after the British massacre of unarmed protesters: “Terrible things happened here. Horrors. The place bears its memories near the surface. […] All around the city, memories. Burning and looting”. And at the plaza itself where the shooting began, Pran Nath (before he takes the name and identity of Jonathan Bridgeman) “feels the weight of absence hanging over the place and hurries past” (177; my emphasis). The phrasing here is striking — the plaza is haunted by the loss or absence of those killed or psychically wounded in the events there, and the only marks that remain from those events are the marks of erasure. Similarly, even places that are less freighted with violent and traumatic histories nevertheless seem to bear the marks of erased history on their surface, so that Professor Chapel finds Oxford oppressive for the associations it bears, the “landmines of memory buried around town”; Oxford, the narrator tells us, “had become a palimpsest” (357), full of traces over which his Georgian pseudo-scientific methodology affords him no control.

Of these two kinds of remembrance, the Empire Exhibition clearly aims for the first category: tightly ordered, like the archive or the museum installation, so as to give the empire control over how its far-flung subjects are represented in the public discourse and collective memory of its citizens back home. As Robert Rydell notes, by the end of the Victorian period the “world on view at the [world fairs and imperial expositions] had been anthropologized and racialized according to social Darwinian taxonomies provided by leading lights of the anthropology profession”, as the sponsors of such events saw value in anthropology “for justifying imperialism to their publics in terms of science-based explanations of racial hierarchies” (Rydell, 2002: 224). There is an analogue to be found in archival accounts of European–Amerindian encounters in the Americas as described by Diana Taylor:

The “primitive” body as object reaffirms the cultural supremacy and authority of the viewing subject, the one who is free to come and go (while the native stays fixed in place and time), the one who sees, interprets, and records. The native is the show; the civilized observer the privileged spectator. (Taylor, 2003: 64)

The Empire Exhibition as depicted by Kunzru bears out this same dynamic, depicting a sanitized history of colonial domination, with half-hearted resistance easily overcome by imperial righteousness. At the Pageant of Empire, for example,

Soldiers and Boy Scouts enact the birth of the empire, pulling Britannia on a large float into the center of the space. When they have done this, they perform cameos of the empire’s growth, assisted in each case by real natives of the newly conquered territory. Maori warriors perform a haka, then surrender to scouts dressed as naval officers. Zulus run on with spears and hide shields, then fall over as they are defeated by Queen Victoria’s glorious cavalry. (268) ⁵

The members of the pageant’s British audience are the “privileged spectators” surveying the primitive body of colonial subjects, and the history of imperialism presented in this spectacle is a crude musealization that “reaffirms the cultural supremacy of the viewing subject” (Taylor, 2003: 64).

As Taylor goes on to note, however, “domination depends on maintaining a unidirectional gaze and stages the lack of reciprocity and mutual understanding inherent in discovery” (2003: 64). And indeed, Levy’s and Kunzru’s novels dramatize precisely the disruption of that controlling “unidirectional gaze”, and the exhibition as put into practice continually threatens to become the second kind of memory site: ragged and unpredictable, with the constant potential to slip outside the frame and bear witness to messier, less flattering histories. Kunzru says of his protagonist in an interview in Wasafiri,

he is something of a blank slate; he lacks an identity. So, the colour of the book doesn’t come out of any psychological depth to his character, but rather as he moves from set-piece scene to set-piece scene as the pageantry of empire plays out all around him. (Aldama, 2005: 12)

The Exhibition certainly aims to be part of that pageantry. Yet for Jonathan it instead lifts the veil and reveals blackness — or blankness — or that which has been repressed in the British self-conception he has spent his life mimicking. Pran/Jonathan gets by as “an impostor, who is able to mimic others perfectly because he has no identity of his own, no roots, no origin, no memory” (Schaff, 2008: 289) — or rather, with an identity “constructed through performance” (Nyman, 2009: 101) — precisely because he builds on what he believes is the firm edifice of British civilization and western rationalism. When those foundations are likewise revealed to be imagined constructions and performances, Jonathan’s carefully maintained persona dissolves, along with his grip on reality.

As Murat Aydemir notes, “mimicry makes porous and insecure the boundaries between imitation as a form of flattery, as ironic caricature, and as the alienation and appropriation of identity. The sincerest form of flattery, imitation can work to estrange the very thing to which it pays homage” (Aydemir, 2006: 212). Jonathan confirms Aydemir’s observation when, walking around Montmartre in Paris some weeks after visiting the Wembley exhibition, he thinks “This terrible blurring is what happens when boundaries are bleached. Pigment leaks through skin like ink through blotting paper” (403). Knowing that his own performance is collapsing, he projects the anxiety onto an impressionist in a cabaret:

One after the other, characters appear. […] Each lasts a few seconds, a minute. […] In between each impression, just at the moment when one person falls away and the next has yet to take possession, the impressionist is completely blank. There is nothing there at all. (404–5)

What gives Jonathan’s and Queenie’s encounters at the Empire Exhibition their disruptive power and makes the exhibition different from the tidiness of the museum display is the human factor: no matter how grotesque and stereotypical the parts given to models/actors to play, the people themselves give a third dimension to the representation. As Hoffenberg notes of imperial exhibitions, “People and social groups were not only collected like objects and passively represented under the glass of exposition buildings. Official and private visitors actively participated in the ‘social intercourse’ at those exhibitions” (Hoffenberg, 2001: 29). This unpredictable human intercourse explains the discomfort of Jonathan, who has always thought of Kunzru’s fictional African tribe the Fotse in a very vague way,

as a collection of attributes, a set of practices and artefacts only dimly attached to real bodies. Like that they had seemed rather noble; keepers of the past, possessors of ancient wisdom. Yet here, in all its horror, is blackness. One of the men makes — surely against regulations — a sign at him, and the others look around. (367)

Jonathan’s indignation at what he presumes is a violation of regulations is telling: these people refuse to maintain the illusion of being screen actors whose essence is fixed in cellulose, and remain stubbornly, unpredictably physical. Moreover, this scene prefigures a later moment when Jonathan accompanies Professor Chapel to British West Africa, and finds that the Africans “refuse to remain mere possessors of beliefs or participants in social organizations. Instead they seem irreducibly, disquietingly physical” (419). One of the scientists with them on the expedition complains that the Fotse “were supposed to be pristine […] almost untouched by the ills of modernity” (434; emphasis in original), and not the degraded, deracinated, and embittered people the researchers find on their trip to Fotseland, “dressed like any Hausa peasants, with no Fotse status marks at all” (432).

Indeed, the uncanny and disturbing quality of the Fotseland display at the Empire Exhibition seems to derive from its premonition of what Chapel, Jonathan, and the rest of their anthropological expedition find when they arrive in the actual place: rather than the idyllic, peaceful, and insulated villagers Chapel had made his career describing, the Fotse are now embattled, hostile, and disconnected from their traditions because of the encroachments of colonial authority. The real Fotse, like their simulations back in Wembley, refuse to fit into Jonathan’s narrowly ordered worldview of an imperial past and present. To use Diana Taylor’s terminology, Jonathan craves the fixity of “archival memory” which exists in the form of documents, maps, remains, and “all those items supposedly resistant to change” (Taylor, 2003: 19). But the actual Fotse people present him instead with the “repertoire”, which “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing — in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (Taylor, 2003: 20).

Because the repertoire of African cultural practice and collective memory constantly changes and requires the presence of actual Africans, it poses a threat to Jonathan’s need for stable identities and stable categories of knowledge — a threat that first reveals itself to him through the Fotseland room at the Empire Exhibition. After returning to Oxford, “he is troubled by the memory of the Fotse villagers. He wants to be rid of them, as if just by entering his thoughts they have cemented some link to his life” (368). Later when Professor Chapel invites him to join his fieldwork expedition to Fotseland, Jonathan “remembers the red-eyed men sitting in the compound at the Empire Exhibition. Suddenly the room seems damp and cold” (382). If Pran Nath’s assumption of Jonathan Bridgeman’s identity is a hubristic flight of Icarus, his encounter with the Africans at the exhibition marks the moment his wings are first singed, and he quickly spirals out of control thereafter.

In contrast, for Queenie in Small Island (unlike for her husband Bernard), the destabilization of fixed ethnic stereotypes that she first experiences at the Empire Exhibition is not threatening but world-expanding. When she first meets Michael Roberts, the RAF man from Jamaica who is briefly housed in her home during the Second World War, she feels that “I was lost in Africa again at the Empire Exhibition, a little girl in a white organza frock with blood rising in my cheeks turning me red. He was coloured” (Levy, 2004: 240). But in contrast to Pran Nath’s revulsion and fear, Queenie reacts to the repressed memory of blackness with arousal, and conceives a mixed-race child with Michael. Her initial emotional response to their night of passion is a confused mélange of lingering racist images: she fears waking up to “a woolly-haired black head or a foot with five nigger toes where my buttoned-up, pyjamaed husband should have been”, and she describes the people in pictures she finds in his wallet as an old Negro man who looks like “a chimpanzee in clothes” and “a little darkie girl with fuzzy-wuzzy hair” (249). The phrase “fuzzy-wuzzy” evokes Rudyard Kipling’s poem of that title (and Kipling’s name is evoked more directly elsewhere in the novel), suggesting that Queenie’s perceptions of Afro-Caribbean people are still moulded at this point in the novel’s timeline by the jingoistic racism of imperial propaganda.

Gradually, though, Queenie’s friendship with Gilbert Joseph during and after the war erodes these stereotypes, and she even becomes confrontationally anti-racist. It is her husband Bernard, not Queenie, who after the war wants to retreat into denial and amnesia in the suburbs, away from “this house with its memories, its prospect haunting his every thought. He was wanting a new start” (424). The haunting memories he wants to flee are personal ones — of his wife’s betrayal with a black man, of the terror of the blitz — but they are also the collectively repressed memories of empire. From Bernard’s perspective these ghosts of the colonial past are newly embodied in immigrants such as Gilbert and Hortense, and they have laid siege to the city, having “invaded by stealth” (390). His reaction echoes that of Jonathan Bridgeman in The Impressionist; for different reasons, both men are horrified at the physical incarnation of blackness in Britain — and all its implications for how empire is remembered and justified.

Obviously, from the perspective of its designers, the subversive potential in the Empire Exhibition that both novels reveal is a flaw, not a deliberate feature. But for anyone interested in commemorating key moments in the violent history of colonialism, there are some lessons to be learned from Levy’s and Kunzru’s representations of these issues. First, we learn to be cautious of monumentalism and musealization. Huyssen’s comments about efforts to memorialize the Holocaust has some relevance for representing the history of colonialism as well; he notes that “it must be commemorated, through an act of political will and with a commitment to the democratic future, even though any monument will always run the risk of becoming just another testimony to forgetting, a cipher of invisibility” (Huyssen, 2003: 80–1). Such a risk is always present, but these two authors suggest ways that the risk can be minimized, by seeking interactive, open-ended, and flexible modes of representation, rather than attempting to fix particular versions of the past in stone, literally or figuratively. If Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso is correct in thinking that novels such as Small Island can help “ensure that the past of black people finds a place in the narratives” of British identity (Muñoz-Valdivieso, 2010: 164), then we might even read the novel’s prologue as a hint that narratives of colonial history designed to impose order, unity, and fixity must inevitably yield, as they do in Levy’s own novel, to multiple perspectives and the messy unpredictability of memory. This is partly Bruce Woodcock’s point when he says that Small Island, like the African woman weaving at the Empire Exhibition, “creates an intricate tapestry of displaced and re-woven fictional threads, a cultural cross-stitching that is a mimetic enactment of the diasporic experience” (2008: 51).

Finally, if Huyssen is correct that the contemporary compulsion to commemorate the past is driven by a number of anxieties, tensions, and paradoxes, these two novels suggest that there is opportunity as well as risk in such commemoration. The implication of opening Small Island with the Empire Exhibition vignette is that this encounter profoundly affected young Queenie, and laid the foundation for her later friendship with Gilbert Joseph, Michael Roberts, and the other Caribbean characters in the book. For Jonathan Bridgeman in The Impressionist, his encounter with the Empire Exhibition is distressing, even traumatic. Yet toward the end of the novel he wonders: “What if, long ago, he got lost? What if he got lost from himself, and could never get back again?” (454). Ultimately, he does find his way again, with the help of a Fotse traditional healer, and his encounter with embodied blackness in the Empire Exhibition sets him on the path toward this resolution, which Jopi Nyman characterizes as “the fluid subject [becoming] a diasporic subject, forming an identity that is linked rather with the margins than the centre” (Nyman, 2009: 107). In both novels, if a new condition of migrancy and the dissolution of British identity and global hegemony create anxiety among the indigenous white population, they also create ironic possibilities for diasporic immigrant populations to create their own spaces of memory and identity. For the protagonist of The Impressionist, at the end he is once again a blank slate, stripped in the last chapter of any name except a pronoun, and with “no thoughts of arriving anywhere. Tonight he will sleep under the enormous bowl of the sky. Tomorrow he will travel on” (465). This time, though, the blankness is not the mirror of powerless mimicry but a freshly cleared construction site, opening up space for more meaningful self-reinvention.