Narratives of Empire: Journeys from the ‘Centre’ and ‘Periphery’

Abstract

To rejoin experience and culture is of course to read texts from the metropolitan centre and from the peripheries contrapuntally…. The great imperial experience of the past two hundred years is global and universal; it has implicated every corner of the globe, the colonizer and the colonized together. In the course of a fascinating ‘excavation’ of British popular culture, entitled ‘Digging for Britain’;¹ Dick Hebdige pauses to examine the film Spare Time, a short documentary on leisure which was directed by Humphrey Jennings in 1939. Hebdige reflects on the part played by documentary films of the Thirties in projecting a particular image of the working class, filtered through the lens of Griersonian radicalism, which he sees as ‘that mixture of the patronizing, the heartfelt and the voyeuristic which speaks not just of times past but of a superseded social order.’ With its narrative voice-over, addressing the world in what Hebdige terms ‘the clipped patrician accent which is the trademark of the films produced under the aegis of John Grierson at the Empire Marketing Board’, Spare Time seems to belong to another time and place, a half-forgotten world of cloth caps and pinafores, of brass bands and pigeon-fancying, which bears very little resemblance to the multicultural, hybrid Britain of the nineties.?