Abstract
Bart Moore-Gilbert, the distinguished postcolonial author, critic and scholar, died on 2 December 2015, a few days before his 63rd birthday. Bart was an active member of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s Editorial Board, and was Professor of Postcolonial Studies and English at Goldsmiths College, London. He was also a leading figure in the development of postcolonial studies beyond its founding moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, initially through his work on British writers of India, and subsequently through his shrewd and challenging accounts of postcolonial theory and its implications.
My attention was first drawn to Bart’s work while I was editing the autobiography of the novelist Philip Meadows Taylor — a figure not widely known beyond India, but one of those earlier colonial administrators whose relations with local people were genuinely close (he married a daughter of the Begum of Oudh) and progressive, at least until the 1857 Rebellion. Bart considered Taylor to be part of the necessary context in which to judge later and better-known figures such as Kipling — indeed, his Oxford DPhil thesis was on precisely this area.
Throughout his career, Bart questioned simplistic assumptions about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, while demonstrating the need to resist the continuing hold of the imperial narrative and its colonial subplots. His early work on Anglo-Indian writers like Meadows Taylor was influenced by Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism (1978) which, however, he never accepted uncritically, arguing that the forms of colonial discourse theory it generated often missed the subtle and contradictory shifts apparent through close attention to literary and related texts as well as to the larger movements of history and ideology.
In his first book, Kipling and “Orientalism” (1986/2014), Bart measured Kipling against and discriminated him from prior Anglo-Indian authors who wrote about India. The ways in which Kipling manipulated themes familiar within that tradition were closely examined — themes such as social and domestic instability, isolation and breakdown. Crucially, the book demonstrated the importance of scholarly, archival work as a basis upon which to develop a sound critique of colonial writing. In it, Bart drew on the Kipling papers at the University of Sussex, as well as such key documents as the files of the Civil and Military Gazette.
Of course, Said’s Orientalism drew on a wide range of sources for its examination of the discourses that — it was claimed — mediated the West’s dominant and dominating relationship with the East. However, as Bart’s book clarified, problems inherent in Said’s belief in the unvarying nature of “Orientalism” emerge as soon as you bring the case of India to bear. Islam, for example, occupied a more complex role in Britain’s management of India than in Said’s account of the West’s relationship with the Middle East.
Bart’s interest in postcolonial writing was first prompted by his experience teaching in a Kenyan “bush school” for a year after graduating in English from Durham University. The O-level syllabus he taught there included African literature — books more about community, justice and history than anything he was familiar with from his A-levels in England, he said. After a spell at the Roehampton Institute (as it was then), and appointment as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College in 1989, he was finally in a position to teach postcolonial literature.
As many of us from former Anglophone colonial territories have found, to pursue such interests meant battling to revise the curriculum. Bart had already revealed an increasingly political and polemical edge to his thinking through articles and essays on British imperialism, the contemporary arts and, again, India. At Goldsmiths he instigated a new MA course on “Postcolonial Fiction: Theory and Practice”, which proved an outstanding success. A popular teacher, Bart later credited the enthusiasm of his Goldsmiths students for his decision to write a critical survey of the whole burgeoning area of postcolonial studies. It was to be the book for which he would become best known.
Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997) was a groundbreaking attempt to address the reshaping of English studies and related modes of cultural analysis produced by the growth of postcolonial studies. In particular, it identified an increasingly heated separation between postcolonial theory on the one hand, and “the wider field of postcolonial criticism” on the other (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 1−2). Those of us toiling in the field were all too conscious of the different directions in which critical thought was proceeding, as well as of the earlier critiques of writers and theorists such as CLR James, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. The achievement of Postcolonial Theory was to provide a shrewd and subtle analysis of the processes by which these figures were being overtaken by what Robert Young ironically labelled the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial studies — Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha.
Fair to a fault towards the varying and often wayward currents of debate during the 1990s, and the “potential [for] ideological irresponsibility” (Dennis Porter, quoted in Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 55) of so many privileged postcolonialists then emerging within the groves of academe, Postcolonial Theory established Bart’s reputation at home and abroad. Numerous invitations to speak at conferences and to lecture followed — all of which he took on with typical energy and aplomb, while continuing to question the nature of solidarity in the general struggle to decolonize the mind. He went on to co-edit a reader in Postcolonial Criticism (Moore-Gilbert et al., 1997), in which the distinction between “criticism” and “theory” was not one he wished to push too hard, believing that what mattered was to show how writing was influenced by, and could resist, the long impact of colonialism.
Reflecting a long-term interest in the cultural traditions available for those of us seeking new or at least revised models of personal and national identity, Bart wrote a succinct study of Hanif Kureishi (2001), in which he explored the challenges for a British Asian of Pakistani origin attempting to create a viable sense of self. Questions of Englishness and “hybridity” now surfaced that were to prove of increasing importance for a man who was himself a migrant from a former colony, and the growing complex of feelings attached to his own past, and in particular towards the father he lost while in his teens, led him to turn towards writing with a more personal and consciously self-reflexive dimension. He characteristically cleared the intellectual ground first by considering the analogues and parallels between postcolonial and “Western” writings in a wide-ranging and original account of Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation (2009).
Broad in scope yet detailed in analysis, and notable for its inclusion of feminist life writing by, for example, Assia Djebar, Sally Morgan and Sara Suleri, Postcolonial Life-Writing argued for a discriminating awareness of the multiple traditions of “auto/biographical” writing from Augustine to the present. While postcolonial studies began to fade as an area of predominant interest, life narratives had become a more potent scenario for “speaking truth to power” (Said’s famous phrase provided the book’s epigraph). And the question Bart now pursued was: what power had his father wielded before he knew him as his young son in colonial East Africa?
The result was Bart’s last book, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets (2014), which deftly interspersed memories of his happily outdoor life with his African minder and his father with his travels to India to pursue archives and eyewitnesses, as he tried to discover the truth about his father’s role as an officer in the Indian Police during the troubled 1940s. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and biography. At the time of the award ceremony, Bart was already quite ill but determined to attend. Before the prize-giving, he spoke of a recent grant to pursue his growing research interest in the situation of Palestinians under the domination of Israel. He intended to write a full study, while also preparing a novel. Alas, it was not to be. Days after the birth of his second child (a son) with his wife, the academic Anna Hartnell, he passed away, deeply mourned by his family and a very large circle of friends.