On “Nationalism and the Imagination”

Extract

In her essay “nationalism and the imagination,” there is a tantalizing glimpse of Gayatri before she was Gayatri Spivak. When she gave the essay as a talk at the biennial meeting of the Commonwealth Association for Languages and Literature in Hyderabad, India, and at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria, her two audiences, though completely different, were evidently asking the same questions about nationalism in a supposedly postnational world. But what is most fascinating for me about the talk is that it hints at the autobiography to come, the story of a girl born in Kolkata whose earliest memories include “the great artificial famine created by the British to feed the military in the Pacific theater in World War II” (276). Would she be surprised to know that, coming from Depression-era northern England, I too have early memories of, if not famine, seeing the skeletal bodies of a family starving in the dying heart of the empire? Meanwhile, at school we made daisy chains and were told that the yellow center was Britain and the petals the colonies. There is nothing subtle about empire.