In Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire, Lia Paradis analyzes the experiences of British administrators in colonial Sudan (1899–1956) through the prism of imperial culture. Expanding on her PhD dissertation, Paradis draws on a rich array of source material in English, including the British metropolitan press, British fiction and nonfiction on Sudan and Egypt, diaries and family correspondence by members of the Sudan Political Service, official publications of the British Sudan government, and later memoirs and interviews. She takes the reader on a fascinating journey from the early British-Egyptian-Sudanese encounter in the 1880s to the decolonization era in the 1960s.
The book is organized into three parts. In part one, “Metropolitan Britain Writes the Sudan,” Paradis examines late nineteenth-century British perspectives on Sudan—especially General Gordon's legacy—as they were articulated in a rapidly growing youth literature and influential press. She also shows how British adventurers and military officers were gradually replaced with civilian officials who benefited from a specific colonial training course from the 1920s. Part two, “Authoring the British-Sudani Identity,” focuses on the experience of several generations of British administrators in Sudan, bringing to the fore intense epistolary exchanges with their relatives in Britain. Creating a third space (Homi Bhabha's famous concept), those discursive practices were central to the efforts deployed by temporary expatriates who simultaneously sought to make a new home in Sudan while preparing their eventual return to Britain. The 1924 mutiny of Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers against British authority is described as a moment of heightened anxiety among British officials, who feared being alienated both from Sudan (where they represented foreign rule) and from Britain (whose journalists were seen as competitors in the production of an authoritative narrative of local events). In part three, “Remembering the Sudan,” Paradis examines how the “British-Sudani” community confronted the symbolic, social, and physical displacement experienced by those who returned to Britain after having served for many years in Sudan. What was the place of colonial returnees in a postcolonial metropole, in terms of cultural identity and socioeconomic status, given the fact that Sudan had not been a colonial territory, but rather a country nominally ruled by a dual Anglo-Egyptian administration and attached to the Foreign Office? The issue of pension liability and the constitution of a specific Sudan Archive acutely reflected such concerns.
Paradis's book contributes to reinserting Sudan into British imperial history. It is part of a broader historiography that explores how the colony (in this case, British colonial experiences in Sudan) shaped the metropole (British culture and society). By delving into the political and intimate world of British officials and their wives, Paradis reveals the modes through which a “British-Sudani” (5) community affirmed itself over the years—through membership in the Sudan Political Service, a shared certainty about the temporary nature of their life in Sudan, common sociability circles and rituals of departure, a collective struggle to claim pension rights, and the foundation of an archive that was envisaged as much as a site of memory and commemoration as a tool for writing history. Far from depicting the British-Sudanis as a monolithic and homogenous group, Paradis brings out the fundamental ambivalence underlying their cultural universe while in Sudan and their sociopolitical status once they settled back in Britain. In the 1950s and 1960s, these former rulers became petitioners caught between a careless British Foreign Office and a nationalist independent Sudanese government. Paradis also provides interesting insights into British gendered experiences in colonial Sudan, analyzing letters and diaries that were written and read by male (and more rarely female) officials, wives, sisters, mothers, and fathers.
Despite its theoretical and empirical wealth, however, Imperial Culture and the Sudan suffers from several shortcomings. Paradis states no research question in the introduction, nor does she discuss her particular focus on English documents produced by British individuals in Britain and Sudan, to the exclusion of sources written (in English or Arabic) by other major actors, such as Sudanese and Egyptian literates. This documentary bias, which should at least be acknowledged, is linked to one of the book's crucial blind spot: there is no consideration of Anglo-Sudanese interactions inside and outside government service and how those interactions shaped the representations and self-perceptions of British officials. The fact that Sudanese people appear very little in the book creates the impression that Paradis in part reproduces the kind of imperial myopia that she locates—and rightly criticizes—in the writings of certain British authors and administrators. The few contextual elements of Sudanese history that are provided are often shallow or mistaken, as shown in her identification of the 1924 events as a “mutiny” (119–131), a British colonial characterization that downplayed the significance of a popular anticolonial movement using demonstrations, strikes and telegrams to voice nationalist protest; the absence of engagement with the north/south internal divide; and frequent misspelling of Arabic names. Paradis relies on a broad scholarship in British studies, British imperial history, and migration studies, but she ignores the important body of works dealing with the multifaceted colonial encounter in Sudan, which, along with my own studies, includes those by, among others, Lilian Sanderson, David Sconyers, Justin Willis, Cherry Leonardi, Heather Sharkey, Ahmad Sikainga, Yoshiko Kurita, Elena Vezzadini, Willow Berridge, Marie Grace Brown, and Alden Young.
Further, three major concepts that Paradis introduces require a more thorough discussion than is provided. She uses the concept of authorship both literally as the act of writing and metaphorically as the act of producing a narrative or a space (discursive only? geographical?). Moreover, she often assumes that the articulation between authorship, diffusion, consumption, and readership is straightforward. She employs the notion of identity (which has been much criticized in the social science literature) so loosely that it ends up encompassing school education, professional training, literary representations, cultural references, social rituals, and political status. Paradis's neologism “British-Sudanis”—modeled on “Anglo-Indians”?—is not explained despite its problematic nature. In fact, the Arabic term sūdānī (derived from sūdān, blacks) conveyed servile or southern origins at least until the 1920s, and it was then appropriated by the northern Sudanese intelligentsia to designate members of the emerging Sudanese nation. Should British officials simultaneously have applied this label to themselves (but did they?), it would have added a layer of complexity to the history of social categorizations in modern Sudan. Notwithstanding these limitations, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of imperial studies, British culture, and Sudanese colonial history.
