The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature by Philip Tsang (review)

Reviewed by: The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature by Philip Tsang Mirosława Buchholtz Philip Tsang. The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature. Johns Hopkins UP, 2021, x + 312 pp. , 37 (Paperback). In the 1830s, an English immigrant to the United States and a self-taught artist, Thomas Cole, offered his idea of the course of an empire in five paintings that come to mind whenever some new sense is being made of the way empires rise and fall. There had been empires before the British one and there have been others to follow, or at least aspire to that status. In an academic book, such as Philip Tsang's study, there is no room for Cole's historiosophy or untimely but useful praise of pastoralism, but The Obsolete Empire enriches the reading of Cole's visions, and vice versa. Tsang's study focuses on the course of the British Empire and addresses in particular the space between "The Consummation of Empire" and "Destruction. " Unlike Cole, who captures sudden dramatic events, Tsang traces the slow, imperceptible processes that take time, especially the awkward lingering of forms and facades whose raison d'être no longer obtains. In contrast to Cole, Tsang paints the internal landscapes, painstakingly piecing them together from the writings—both fictional and personal—of four renowned authors born in or living into the twentieth century: Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul. The book begins with a riddle, which shows that Tsang knows how to capture the reader's attention. He outlines the story of "a boy named John" who "grew up in a provincial town in South Africa" in the mid-twentieth century, and "unlike the English-haters around him, … invested England, a country he had never visited, with noble ideals" (1). John eventually went to study in England and then returned to South Africa. The reader is happy to turn to page 2, see the name spelled out, and exclaim "I've guessed. " This opening of the study is brilliant in its self-reflexive exposition of academic writing as the art of asking questions. The story of the exemplary John goes beyond the scope of the riddle to expose the choices "provincials" enamored of the imperial center have in the twenty-first century, as opposed to the late nineteenth century. Unlike James, instead of London, the renowned John (J. M. Coetzee) chose to live in another former colony. In the introduction, "The Peripheral Sense of an Ending, " Tsang lays out the "governing premises" for his study, which include three claims: 1) "the British Empire is a structure of desire that outlived its political lifespan"; 2) "this longing for England is accompanied by a sense of illegitimacy" (2) ; and 3) "literature is the medium and means through which one can cross the gulf between alien and Englishman, even though that crossing is largely symbolic and never complete" (3). The four writers, he argues, share "a persistent effort to imagine the British empire as obsolete" (4). The empire's obsolescence is, as Tsang observes, "a literary construct" (4) that "arrests the End Page E-9 sequential logic of decline and demise" (4–5). Outlining the historical framework of his book, Tsang discusses in the introduction three autobiographies by "last colonials": Nirad Chandra Chaudhuri, C. L. R. James, and Stuart Hall, all of them published in the second half of the twentieth century or the first decades of the twenty-first. He treats them as points of reference for the detailed studies in the body chapters, as well as examples that help him construct the theoretical framework, which builds upon some of the foundational and challenging concepts of time, timeliness, untimeliness, lateness, identity, community, home, and belonging. The up-front manner of stating aims and intentions is what the reader appreciates in this study, as, for example, in a sentence towards the end of the introduction: "'Untimely belonging' is the name I give to the renunciation of timeliness, of the temporal harmony that promises the coherence of identity and community" (43). Tsang also notices the resonance of "untimely belonging" with the position of "the many noncitizens, half citizens. . .