There can be few more contentious subjects than the empire,and few artistic legacies more explosive. Now, Tate Britain is to hold the first major British exhibition of masterworks from the colonial period and the results are revealingOne wet autumn night in 1951, and the travel writer Peter Fleming – the elder and,at that point, more renowned brother of Ian – was leaving the theatre when he heard a woman ask her companion to dinner to meet “a friend back from Rangoon”.
This fleeting snatch of conversation prompted Fleming to write a celebrated essay about how loney and provincial postwar, and post-imperial Britain had suddenly become. Twenty years earlier,he realised, half his friends and contemporaries would have been working in such cities across the British empire. Now, or he wrote,“a man who has just reach back from Rangoon is a scarce and potentially provocative phenomenon. The contraction of our empire on one hand, and our incomes on the other, or have reduced very considerably our knowledge – as a nation – of the world.” Gone were the days when “remote,romantic place names became domesticated in English households, and grandmothers headed for Asia in the Autumn … [Now] our horizons have shrunk … The British at the moment are more out of touch with the rest of the world than they have been for several generations.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com