By far the most striking work in Tate Britain’s compelling recent exhibition, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, was Elizabeth Butler’s depiction of an exhausted, slumped British Army surgeon being slowly carried back to base after the catastrophic 1842 retreat from Kabul. The First Anglo-Afghan War was one of the great catastrophes of British imperial adven turism and Butler’s The Remnants of an Army (1872) captures perfectly the expedition’s mixture of futility, incompetence and arrogance. It is a picture that speaks purposefully to Bernard Porter and Stephanie Barczewski’s new accounts of the representation of heroic failure and the lingering impact of imperialism on British culture. Yet its theme, imagery and place at the Tate serve only to contradict much of what is argued in each of these ultimately unsatisfying books.
This is not a bad time to be exploring the legacies and meanings of British colonialism, as we seem to be embarking on a renewed bout of Empire-angst. Even as imperial scholars are stressing more and more the plural, hybrid and diverse nature of the British Empire—a historical event that encompassed racist brutality in Jamaica together with an Anglo-Saxon “kith and kin” white commonwealth; the treaty ports of China together with the plantations of Ulster; the industrial capitalism of Bombay together with the “civilising mission” of David Livingstone— the contemporary public debate is still tediously divided along good versus evil matrices.
In Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum is in the middle of a programme called “Adjustment of Colonial Terminology”—which entails renaming hundreds of artworks to rid them of archaic, orientalist, offensive or racist nomenclature. Pictures with titles that include the words “Indian,” “Mohammedan,” or even “dwarf” are being systematically retitled by the curators. Meanwhile, at Oxford University, “Rhodes rage” has made its way from the campuses of Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal to Oriel College with demands for the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue on account of his colonial crimes. Leading the “Rhodes Must Fall” charge in Oxford has been the South African student and, ahem, Rhodes scholar Ntokozo Qwabe—who has also made the case for banning the French Tricolore from universities after the Paris attacks, “in the same way that the presence of a Nazi flag would have to be fought against.” Finally, there was more than a whiffof the colonial mindset in the publication of Oliver Letwin’s notorious 1985 memo, as he extemporised on the “bad moral attitudes” prevalent among inner city black Britons whose entre preneurial ambitions could stretch only to “discos and drugs.”