Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the empire in the years 1890-1920. By developing the key motifs of lateral interaction and colonial interdiscursivity, Boehmer builds a picture of the imperial world as an intricate network of surprising contacts and margin-to-margin interrelationships, and of modernism as a far more constellated cultural phenomenon than previously understood. Individual case studies consider Irish support for the Boers in 1899-1902, the path-breaking radical partnership of the Englishwoman Sister Nivedita and the Bengali extremist Aurobindo Ghose, Sol Plaatje's conflicted South African nationalism, and the cross-border, cosmopolitan involvements of W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf. Underlining Frantz Fanon's perception that 'a colonized people is not alone', Boehmer significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.

1. Anti-Imperial Interaction across the Colonial Borderline Introduction Cross-national Intertextuality Networks of Resistance The Irish Boer War and The United Irishman 2. India the Starting Point: Cross-National Self-Translation in 1900s Calcutta 'From all points do the paths converge': A Unique Encounter A Warlike Spirituality The Cross-Meshed Calcutta Context Interdiscursivity: Of Kali and the Gita 'She is in me as she is in you': Nivedita's Kali-Worship 3. 'But Transmitters'?: The Interdiscursive Alliance of Aurobindo Ghose and Sister Nivedita Aurobindo Ghose in England: 'the spirit alone that saves' The Young Margaret Noble: 'the ocean through an empty shell' A Joint 'Cry for Battle' 'To assail and crush the assailant': Intertextual Links 4. 'Able to sing their songs': Solomon Plaatje's Many-Tongued Nationalism A Barolong, a Gentleman: An Exemplary Career Nationalism and the Transatlantic 'People's Friend' 5. 'Immeasurable Strangeness' between Empire and Modernism: W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf Towards a Theory of Modernism in the Imperial World Leonard Woolf: Reluctant Imperialism The Cultural Nationalist as Modernist Conclusion: A Narrative Claim upon the Jungle

Elleke Boehmer – Hildred Carlile Professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London

`Review from previous edition This formidably well-researched and carefully documented book demonstrates the strengths of a complex comparative methodology in postcolonial studies.' The Yearbook of English Studies