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.

This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the British empire. Boehmer significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.

Inspiring ... meticulously researched and gracefully written ... Throughout the book Boehmer's commitment to historical occasion and accuracy acts as a necessary counterweight to some of the abstract excesses of postcolonial theory, enabling her to be conceptually adventurous but historically responsible.