This chapter is an overview of the life and work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), whose poetry collection We Are Going (1964) was not only the first ever book of poetry by an Aboriginal person but also one of the fastest-selling books in Australian history. It traces her early involvement in civil rights in Queensland, her ongoing activism in Aboriginal struggles, and the power of her poetry to articulate the feelings and lived experiences of the Aboriginal people. It discusses Oodgeroo’s friendship with Judith Wright and her founding of Moongalba, an Aboriginal cultural and education centre on Noonuccal country. The chapter outlines her role in various national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts organisations and her international connections with Indigenous writers. Lastly, it emphasises Oodgeroo’s lifelong work in foregrounding Aboriginal cultural and political perspectives.

This chapter examines the ways in which Victorian industrial novels, which emerged on the British literary scene in the early 1840s, revealed – and in many ways concealed – the imperial and racial structures that were fundamental to nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Also termed “condition of England” novels, these narratives critiqued current social hierarchies while guarding themselves from appearing to promote working-class revolts. In addition, they had to negotiate how (or whether) to represent the extent to which British imperialism fueled industrialism’s acts of dehumanization and violence. Focusing on industrial novels written by authors including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, the essay explores two central ways in which these texts addressed these connections to race and empire: first, through representations of British factory workers in terms that evoked transatlantic slavery and imperial otherness; and second, through British spaces and colonial objects that called forth the imperial stories and identities often suppressed in industrial novels.

This chapter draws on conceptualizations of the romance form by Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson to provincialize them and delineate the imperial romance and its formal and functional specificities. It argues that the imperial romance is a colonial scripture, that is, a ritualized site for the articulation and performance of colonial ideology. It reads Philip Meadows Taylor’s “mutiny novel” Seeta (1872), set in India, and Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), set in Africa, to illustrate how these texts rearticulate categories of “good” and “evil.” It also underlines how these texts articulate and resolve colonial anxieties, especially around racial miscegenation. In underlining the imperial romance as a key site for the symbolic resolution of real contradictions of colonial life, the essay illuminates its ritual (and utopian) function that reaffirms and perpetuates colonial ideology.

Travel or adventure drama became a staple of English theatre with British maritime expansion. Renaissance drama’s mercantile poetics lionized middle-class traders, but foreign exotica also provoked deep unease. The emergent imperial consciousness was at once ambitious and anxious. The nascent British Empire’s dynamic of emulation and disavowal produces “peripheral heroics.” Voyage drama’s glorification of English deeds abroad follows Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’s arc of heroic action with unlikely protagonists – women, middle-class adventurers, pirates, and merchants – rising from low social origins to claim a place at imperial centers. Their decidedly middle-class status is defensively justified by nobility of character. A strong Christian strain frames that valor in terms of humility and even martyrdom. Racialized encounters with Islamic characters abjure the foreign taint, by redirecting it at European rivals, the Spanish and the Dutch. Defined by English marginality, this heroism is marked by ambivalences, with shifting and flexible modes of gendering and racializations. Through transnational figures with malleable identities, Renaissance drama negotiated English marginality in an interimperial context, exploring through peripheral heroics English desires for and fears of transculturation, their emulation and disavowal of empire.

As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s, the British Empire was threatened by nationalist insurrection in the colonies and by US–Soviet competition for global supremacy. Over the next three decades, the loss of over fifty overseas possessions problematized the country’s dominant narrative of national identity, much of it centered on the wealth and power accumulated by empire. The complex cultural responses to decolonization were typified in literature. On the one hand, diasporic authors from the Global South developed a powerful strand of anti-imperial commentary, illustrated by the work of Sam Selvon, Beryl Gilroy, Andrew Salkey, Attia Hosain, and Grace Nichols. On the other hand, several generations of (largely) white, middle-class English writers stuck to the imperial attitudes of the past, condemning indigenous revolt in the colonies (Evelyn Waugh, Paul Scott, Olivia Manning, P. H. Newby) and objecting to immigration into the metropolis (John Braine, Anthony Burgess, Margot Bennett). While postimperial fiction existed, most famously in novels by George Orwell, Doris Lessing, and Colin MacInnes, postcolonial commentary would have a much greater impact on literary treatments of empire and identity in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the “verse politics” of eighteenth-century Asia. It explores how Anglophone authors used epics and ruin poetry to advance imperialism, assess governmental policy, and reimagine the role of India in the British Empire. To demonstrate poetry’s role in politics and imperial policymaking, this chapter focuses on the career of Eyles Irwin, a colonial administrator stationed in Madras during the 1770s and 1780s and one of the earliest authors to publish English poetry while in India. The chapter analyzes his collection of travel poems, the Occasional Epistles (1783), and his lengthy poetic epistle, “The Ruins of Madura, or, the Hindoo Garden” (c. 1785–92), which versifies the holy sites and gardens of an ancient southern Indian city, Madura (Madurai), and the decayed palace of one of its Hindu rulers, Tirumala Nayaka. From these details, and Madura’s ruins, Irwin reanimates a South Indian culture and polity. Epics and ruin poetry reimagined writing about empire not as an attempt at personal fame but as an extension of imperial policy, and in ruin poetry Anglophone authors sought to reconcile the obvious oppression of India with the supposed liberty of Britain’s empire.

Walter Scott’s “classical form of the historical novel” establishes a plot of modern national formation through political absorption into a greater imperial union through the dialectical clash of opposing forces. Relocating agency from individual persons to an impersonal historical process, the novel generates soft or weak protagonists who waver between political allegiance and – with the biologization of historical purpose later in the nineteenth century – between dispositions of gender, sex, and race. The historical novel is refitted for Victorian imperial romance and its ideological program of “Greater Britain,” a global union of English-speaking peoples, in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! Historical novels written in the imperial peripheries – in Quebec and Bengal – adapt the “Greater Britain” plot and destabilize it from within. Aubert de Gaspé’s Les anciens Canadiens justifies the conquest of New France through an equivalence between French settlers and Scottish Highlanders, which is derailed by a third group the Indians, the actual natives whose elimination secures the imperial dispensation. In Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath, an eighteenth-century Hindu rebellion against Mughal overlords prepares the way for the future ascendancy of an independent Indian nation in which synthesis with imperial Britain is only a passing stage.

Metropolitan liberal thinkers idealized settler colonialism as the positive face of nineteenth-century imperialism. The developmental logic of stadial thought played an enduring role in asserting settlement’s racially demarcated conception of civilization and sociability. A variety of forms of settler narrative from Australia and New Zealand circulated widely in Britain and their portrayals of character engaged directly with those civilizing claims. The chapter first considers two contrasting accounts of cultural contact: Arthur Phillip’s The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (1789), and Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand, a Tale of the Good Old Times (1863). It then addresses the thematizing of settler criminality in Australian novels: Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870–72), Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery under Arms (1882–83), and Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886). It lastly assesses the delineation of gender roles in short story collections set in frontier environments: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902), and G. B. Lancaster’s Sons o’ Men (1905). While representations of settler character interrogated liberalism’s justification of colonization as a means of civilizational progress and improvement, settlement’s racialized foundations of possessive individualism also remained visible but were largely unchallenged.

This chapter explores the place of empire and imperialism in the British literature of the Popular Front period (1934–40). During this period, left-aligned writers responded to the Communist International’s call for broad antifascist alliances built on national cultural traditions with an outpouring of works of fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as critical reevaluations of literary history. These contributions are characterized by an evocation of “the people” as a diverse, progressive, antifascist subject, but one always national in character and therefore fraught with ambiguities and contradictions. The chapter considers the ways that writers based in Britain negotiated the connections between antifascism, anticolonialism, and anti-imperialism in this late interwar moment. It focuses first on the literary milieu around the influential journal Left Review, and second on the interlinked work of Ralph Fox, Mulk Raj Anand, and Sajjad Zaheer. In concludes by suggesting that the Spanish Civil War provided the occasion for some leftist writers from Scotland and Wales to imagine the continuities between working-class history, anticolonialism, and antifascism in their work.

When the atrocities of the French Revolution led Romantic authors to test the viability of anti-imperial imaginaries in their poetry, many of them relocated revolution from Europe to so-called Oriental geographies. The cultural and aesthetic distance of exoticized topographies generated a spectacle of revolutionary violence that could be consumed safely in Britain. In the poetic works of Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), Felicia Hemans (The Abencerrage), Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Giaour), Percy Shelley (Laon and Cythna), Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer), and Thomas Love Peacock (Ahrimanes), revolutionary struggle is envisaged as an enterprise marked by a cyclical logic that anticipates the return of empire: It is redefined as an inevitable failure to undo oppressive power structures. An ethnoracially demarcated space of fantasy, the Orient allows these poets to experiment with revolutionary narratives in a way that affectively neutralizes the lived trauma of revolution by reducing it to a dehistoricized and yet universalizable configuration. In the Orientalist poetry of Romantics, then, revolution becomes imaginable as an anti-imperial event with the caveat that its present unrealizability is affirmed in its consumption as a culturally and ethnoracially distanced spectacle.

Historical tensions over race and nation have bubbled over time and resurfaced again since the Brexit vote in the forms of increased racism and a “hostile environment.” British Muslim identity and belonging has been a complex process of negotiation in the British Isles and beyond. This chapter explores how transnational Muslim identities in Britain form digital interconnections and face disruptions in an increasingly securitized global architecture in which the digital serves as a place of contestation and surveillance. Through summary close readings from selected writings by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Ayisha Malik, and Zaffar Kunial, this chapter emphasizes how Muslim writers translate the limits of a national English identity for migrant groups after Brexit through new representations of enclosed spaces such as gardens and parks.

This chapter tracks the way the accumulation of capital in the colonial metropole enabled a cross-cultural dialogue among certain poets from the East and the West in London in the 1920s and 1930s, one that gradually diminishes in the postcolonial period. Poetry, in the modernist period, sought to dismantle the binary between authenticity and derivation, a binary which has been given new life in our own moment and has, therefore, blinded us from seeing these poets as participating in a common enterprise, even if it is one beset with many conceptual pitfalls resulting from the colonial relation. Nevertheless, poets as distinct as Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, and Una Marson – and thinkers such as C. L. R. James – wished to construct a universal humanism out of the uneven terrain of imperial modernity, an impulse they shared with such complicated figures as W. B. Yeats and even the violently reactionary Ezra Pound. Ultimately, this unstable humanism gives way to the starker divides of the period of decolonization.

While much has been written about race, colonization, and anticolonialism in fin-de-siècle Irish gothic works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this chapter focuses particular attention on Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction’s engagements with empire and the imperialized world. Written in the context of an increasingly expansive, globalized literary marketplace, the works assessed here – including Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), the anonymous Amasina; or the American Foundling (1804), and Henrietta Rouvière Mosse’s Arrivals from India (1812) – provide an instructive example of Irish writers’ deft manipulation of systems of global economy to debate and contest questions of empire, relative civilization/barbarity, and ethnographies of race. They also point to the formal evolution of Irish gothic encouraged and enabled by writers’ responses to the economic and material realities of empire. Keenly aware of their global readership and their novels’ status as commodities, these writers invoke and reshape the gothic to think about the nature of authorship itself. Their works thus invite a reconsideration of the accepted makeup and characteristics of Romantic gothic, at the same time as they insist on an expansion of traditional canons of gothic and Irish gothic literature.