Larissa Douglass
Recently, one of my friends told me that the anglosphere is dead and the future lies in Asia. Beyond the condition of the world economy that this fashionable attitude reflects, the fashion is actually typical of the anglosphere itself. The term “anglosphere” became briefly popular in conservative circles around 2003-2004, reviving Churchillian values opposite a liberal vision of multicultural evolution, which was dismissed by conservative critics as self-hatred and self-immolation. With these debates at the back of my mind, I have been reading The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 2: My Country Right or Left.
Should such ideas, either the anglosphere or its inevitable downfall, be taken literally—or do they signify something else? Orwell wrote the 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius” contemplating British patriotism and the English class system in the face of war and invasion. His call for British socialism to defeat continental fascism additionally isolated an ethereal spirit in historically British societies that still persists today. In Orwell’s eyes, Britain’s ramshackle dedication to internal disagreement, lack of resolution and fractured progress were held together by an overriding commitment by all citizens to the rule of law and other unseen bonds.
He likened British society to a stuffy Victorian family, with all the wrong members in charge, “cupboards bursting with skeletons … and … a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.” For Orwell, the evil of this family as it stretched across the world in the empire lay not in its power, violence or inequalities but in its insufferable banality: “Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.” The result was not some majestic and terrifying struggle between oppressors and oppressed but an acceptance of pervasive mediocrity: “Instead of going out to trade adventurously in the Indes one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London.”
If internal strife between Orwell’s “Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger,” and middle class “Colonel Blimp” patriots, such as the “half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain,” equally mirrored self-deception about defeat or glory, Orwell decided that the mediocre compromise between the two, where things actually got done, was equally misleading. Half-baked complacency enabled and concealed a hidden reserve of spirit that was awakened only at the last possible moment in times of crisis, healing divisions and propelling the population into unexpectedly efficient displays of decisive action and medieval aggression: “There can be moments when the whole nation suddenly swings together and does the same thing, like a herd of cattle facing a wolf.” How ever this sleeping cultural sensibility might reappear, it is safe to say that it will be in a form cast between right- and left-wing politics that no one can expect or predict. It is one of the “wild cards” that will be played in the future of international affairs.
Nonna Gorilovskaya
My nonfiction pick is The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan. The book is a very fluent and engaging historical account of the Partition and its terrible violence. Khan’s central point is that although we take the creation of India and Pakistan as givens, at the time, most people had only a vague idea of what was going to happen when the British left. One of the parts that I found most interesting was Khan’s discussion of the role of Congress and the Muslim League in the bloodshed:
“…Elite leaders, often the product of imperial schools and colleges, were as likely as the British that they had replaced to cite the madness of the masses, and apply the vocabulary of craziness, insanity and of a fever gripping the people, blaming ‘crooks, cranks and…mad people’ to try to explain the inexplicable devastation that had taken place. The language of class could be a convenient way for the leadership to wash their hands of their own explicit or inadvertent culpability. The poor and the uneducated must, of course, it was naturally assumed, have been mostly culpable. The information that militant, and often middle-class, organized cadres, sometimes fully answerable to Congress and League politicians, were at the forefront of events was known but glanced over.”
For my book club, I started but dropped My Life in France by Julia Child. Perhaps I am just too sarcastic, but I was generally annoyed by her constant, exuberant jolliness and frustrated by the fact that I have no time to try out her very delicious (check out my friend’s replica of Child’s pear tart) but extremely labor-intensive creations.
Now come the guilty pleasure reads! It is usually my rule—one that I break often—to read the book before I see the movie. I’ve faithfully seen all of the Harry Potter movies so far but my reading has progressed slowly. As I was reading the first two, I just felt that the movies stuck very faithfully to the text and that I was not learning any new information. But I really got into Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and I am curious to see what I think of the later books. I was told that the editors lost more and more power as J.K. Rowling grew more and more popular.
My other guilty pleasure was Julia Gregson’s East of the Sun, a story of three Englishwomen who travel to India in 1928 in search of adventure, love and work. The characters were intriguing—the central one was a writer, so bonus points—and this was squarely good historical chick lit. A fascinating factoid from the book: Englishwomen who sailed to India annually in search of dashing (or not so dashing) bureaucrats and officers overseeing the Empire were called the “Fishing Fleet.” The women who did not land husbands were dubbed “returned empties.” Ouch!
Jessica Hun
As my research interest continues to be central-local relations in China, I have been updating my bookshelf with current scholarly works on this topic. De Facto Federalism in China: Reforms and Dynamics of Central-Local Relations by Zheng Yongnian is part of a series on Contemporary China which suggests that with deepening reform and openness, China’s central-local relations is increasingly functioning on federalist principles. Despite the author’s attempts at explaining why this may the case, I have reservations because of the simple fact that federalism is based on constitutionally guaranteed rights and powers for various levels of government, clear division of power between the central government and other state organs and, most importantly, a genuine relinquishing of central government powers. These fundamental conditions are still not present in China, nor is there a genuine intention to guarantee any local powers. Another issue is that the implementation of constitutional provisions are dependent on the further enactment of implementing legislation such that for any constitutional provisions to come into effect, more steps need to be taken to guarantee implementation.
The notion of the supremacy of the central government is further reinforced by the book Hong Kong’s New Constitutional Order: The Resumption of Chinese Sovereignty and the Basic Law by Yash Ghai. This is a comprehensive analysis of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region focusing on the limitations of its constitutional and legal systems which aim to preserve capitalism under communist leadership. The book addresses fundamental constraints of governance implied in Hong Kong’s own constitution, better known as the Basic Law. Reading these two books back to back suggests that an important basis for communist rule is that local powers are at most selectively delegated with no specific guarantees.
