Justifying Research, Pt. 1

The sun never sets on the British Empire: At some point in history, all of these nations in red
were part of the British Empire. Kind of amazing, right?

Frequently – and unsurprisingly – researchers are asked to justify their research. For those in the humanities, this task can be particularly difficult. It’s rare that humanities research will produce a tangible product that will improve life somehow, whereas it’s much easier to think of research in the hard sciences as a process with concrete results applicable to everyday problems. All of this is not to say that research in the humanities is not without results or benefits, merely that both can be a little difficult to see sometimes.

Besides my love of research (and need of an Interim credit), why am I doing this research? Put differently, why should this research be done? What benefits does it yield? As I see it, there are a number of reasons why this research is valuable. Hopefully, I can hash out some of the bigger reasons for you here.[1]

Strike a Pose: Britannia

The colonial project is frequently discussed as an economic one. In this definition, such-and-such an explorer came to such-and-such a land, (re)peopled it, established a business, and linked the colonizing nation to the colony economically. This overly simplistic definition is a great reduction of colonial dynamics because it ignores the imperial side of colonial policy.  In “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes,” Engseng Ho articulates this division in colonial policy through his definitions of “colonialism” and “imperialism.” He says that colonialism is the physical engagement between native and colonizer, while “imperialism” “refers to foreign domination, without the necessity of presence or possession, over expansive, transnational spaces – and many places.” Colonialism is physical, while imperialism is more ideological. They are related projects, and they both occur in the British colonial project.[2]

Scholarship exists on the imperial dynamics in the British colonial project. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said reads texts, like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as artifacts containing British imperial ideologies. He argues that imperial culture is so pervasive, both in England and its colonies, that it permeates the English novel and is promulgated by it. In Said’s words, the British novels from this era are caught in “the imperial process of which they [are] manifestly and unconcealedly a part.” Anne McClintock also attempts to illuminate the process of imperialism in her work, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. McClintock reads imperialism as an ideological process that starts in the Victorian home and affects Victorian notions of gender, class, race, nation, and just about everything in between. She states, “imperialism is not something that happened elsewhere,” but instead it’s a process and ideological system that flourished in England and influenced nearly every aspect of Victorian identity. These scholars differ on where and how they see imperialism functioning – Said argues that it is a product of the British novel while McClintock ties it more closely to the Victorian household – but that they agree that there is an ideological character to the colonial contest points to an imperial project in progress.

Exploring the imperial dynamics at work in the colonial project is, I believe, an extremely important task for postcolonial scholars. It allows scholars to theorize a more complete picture of Empire, and in doing so it also allows them to begin to understand the historical and political situations for contemporary postcolonial nations. For this reason, works like Said’s and McClintock’s are invaluable. At the same time, contemporary postcolonial criticism is lacking. The rise of queer theory has shown the importance of sexuality in identity politics. If scholars want to present a complete picture of Empire and the ideology that supports it, then they should also pay attention to Empire’s relationship to sexuality. Scholarship that has been done in this area has focused largely on heterosexuality and on the colonized perspective (I'm looking at you, McClintock and Stoler). My research, in contrast, hopes to illustrate imperial ideology’s stance on homosexuality by showing how it influenced the lives of gay British men, men politically unidentified with the colonized.

Besides providing a model for understanding Empire, I hope this project also provides a theory for understanding how minority groups, specifically those constructed around sexual identity, lived as countercultures in a culture that excluded them. I also hope this project provides some ways for understanding how these minority groups internalize ideology, particularly ideology that posits them as an undesirable Other.

These are just a few of the reasons my research is academically profitable. In Culture and Imperialism, Said also brings up a few points that link the development of imperialism with the development of modernism. This would be an interesting relationship to explore further, and I am sure that scholarship on this relationship would also benefit from my research. I have yet to fully develop this idea for myself, but I am certain that reasons like this will continue to arise and lend merit to the work I am doing, even though I cannot see the consequences of my research quite yet.

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[1] Including all the reasons for doing this research in this one post made it kind of lengthy, so I decided to divide it into two posts: this one will discuss the academic and theoretical reasons why I think this research is important, while the next will discuss more pressing reasons for doing this research.

[2] As a small aside, colonialism does not necessitate imperialism, just as imperialism does not necessitate colonialism. In fact, Ho’s paper attests to this fact; he investigates dynamics in US/Middle Eastern relations where no colonial structures exist.