Postcolonialism

We all like to think of ourselves as civilised. Civilisation is like ethics: a concept and an underlying value system that seems impossible to oppose. Who, after all, could possibly be against civilisation? Who would want to take issue with the institutional stability, the democratic order and the standards of fairness, decency and culture we have come to see as hallmarks of a civilised life? Brett Bowden does. He does so in an ambitious and fascinating book that offers what could be called a genealogy of civilisation: an inquiry into the history, meaning and political impact of a concept.

At first sight, a genealogy of civilisation seems a rather dry and academic exercise. Bowden, a political scientist at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, examines the political and cultural contexts in which the idea and the ideal of civilisation emerged. He locates the linguistic roots of civilisation in fourteenth-century French, but then focuses primarily on how the concept took on an increasingly important meaning in the French, English and German vocabulary during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Bowden draws only on English-language sources, he still offers a sophisticated and remarkably wide-ranging discussion of how the concept of civilisation became central to philosophy, legal discourse, scientific progress, socio-political institutions and colonial ambitions.

Kingston, Jamaica was scary in early 1985. Asked what reggae track was playing on his shop stereo, a Rastaman retaliated, ‘What the fuck do you want to know for?’ An elderly, one-legged woman maintained a meagre crafts display in a dockside souvenir shed, though no cruise ship had called there in a year. A ‘cheap’ chicken dinner cost more than a waiter earned in a month. A block from the hotel, young men menaced foreigners ‘taking the sights’. Watching Jamaica play Trinidad at Sabina Park involved a gate check by armed police with dogs. A passing motorist picked us up after the game: ‘too dangerous to walk in Kingston now.’ Elsewhere on the island, a gang gathered while we inspected Marcus Garvey’s statue in St Anne (significantly, the birthplace of reggae stars Burning Spear and Bob Marley). One Montego Bay five-star hotel’s driveway was lined with prostitutes; another halved its original price to attract us as its only guests – the pool terrace overlooked a slum worthy of the Rio favelas. A planet away from the postcard Caribbean, it was just as far from other West Indian sites.

Through the significant cultural presence of Heart of Darkness, I am regularly confronted with the work of Joseph Conrad in my everyday life: an elephant in Disney’s Tarzan exclaims ‘the horror’ at the sight of a human camp; a young man reads the novella on a ship bound for Skull Island in the latest King Kong; and, during the fortnight while I am writing this review, Radio National is broadcasting a serialised reading of the novella each afternoon. In Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire, Terry Collits wonders ‘how … we may read and understand Conrad nowadays’. With so many cultural claims to just one Conradian text, such a question is timely.

Those readers who were sympathetic to the arguments in The Empire Writes Back (1989) by Bill Ashcroft et al., will experience in Post-Colonial Transformation the pleasures of engaging with a reinvigorated friend. For others, like this reviewer, who found this influential earlier volume both theoretically and politically troublesome, Ashcroft’s new book will provoke familiar objections.

In Neil Armfield’s recent production of Dallas Winmar’s play Aliwa – about the struggle of the Davis family in Western Australia in the 1930s to avoid becoming members of the stolen generations – the character of Aunty Dot Collard, Jack Davis’s sister, was played brilliantly by Deborah Mailman. Aunty Dot herself, flown over to Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre, introduced the show and then sat on the side of the stage on an old red sofa smiling benignly, and interfering occasionally, as she watched her history being performed. But which was the ‘real’ Aunty Dot was something the show left up to the audience to decide.