The uses of (an)other history: a digression from Linda Colley's Britishness and otherness: an argument

Abstract

The question that animates this paper is deceptively simple: what is brought into ‘play’ in the conjunction of the signifiers ‘Britishness’ and ‘Otherness’? Is the coupling of these two terms merely a taxonomic convenience, a way of marking out apparently fixed, mostly immutable categories such as ‘nation’, ‘cultural practice’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘Empire’? Or, conversely, is the opposition of ‘Britain-as-subject’ and its panoply of archipelagic and colonial ‘objects’ essentially a tactical manoeuvre driven by ongoing investments in a particular kind of narrative economy?