| To describe cultural production in the 80s in theatrical terms, as pageants and acts, is to suggest a stage upon which class conflict manifested in semiotic moments, political debates in traveling spectacles, social movements in consumer trends, national longings in taste preferences, and economic shifts in deliberate aesthetic practices. The 80s was indeed a decade of flux. Many writers, artists, and filmmakers questioned the transition from manufacturing to service industries and the return to conservative family values, blind patriotism, and a culture of greed that economic liberalism engendered under Margaret Thatcher, but this dissertation focuses on writers who felt disenchanted with another, yet related, form of return that can be characterized as Raj nostalgia. Objects associated with a return to Empire during the 80s -- namely, the bazaar, bungalow, cantonment, and memsahib's dining room -- offered audiences a way to restore national memory through the commodification of loss, presenting an illusion of consensus predicated on the consumption of pleasurable spectacles that camouflaged a more direct war against immigrants. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Gita Mehta, David Dabydeen, Farrukh Dhondy, Ravinder Randhawa, Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Hanif Kureishi, Deborah Moggach, V.S. Naipaul, and Paul Scott all raised questions about the legacy of the British in India and, more significantly, the residual traces of the Raj in Britain, including the unemployed ex-colonial subject associated with the riots that swept across the country early in the decade. "Raj Rage" -- a term that implies frenzied consumption of things nostalgic -- can thus refer as easily to the forces that drew audiences to the British Empire as to the rioters protesting the symbolic value of the Raj in the British cultural imagination during the 1980s. Moreover, any invocation of the term Raj nostalgia necessarily involves an analysis of how goods traveled, what they signified, and how they functioned for consumers instead of a cursory survey of the symbols and sentiments that returned in the texts of the decade. The subtitle of this dissertation, Nostalgia for Empire and its Discontents , therefore, evokes an effort to address the dialectic embedded in a war of position between nationalism as nostalgia and spectacularised non-work. |
