The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire

Abstract

This thesis is about the Booker Prize-the London-based literary award given annually to "the best novel written in English" chosen from writers from countries which are part of or have been part of the British Commonwealth. The approach to the Prize is thematically but not chronologically historical, spanning twenty-six years of award-winning novels from the Prize's inauguration in 1969 to a cut-off point of 1995. The twenty-nine novels which have won or shared the Prize in this period are examined within a theoretical framework intended to map out the literary terrain which the novels inhabit. More specifically, the thesis is arranged in chapters which explore individually themes that occur within the larger narrative that is formed by this body of novels. The chapters, which are prefaced with thematic introductions and framed by theoretical commentary, explore aspects of the cultures, social trends, and movements that the novels invoke collectively, spanning the stages of British Empire perceived by their authors over the last three decades. Individually and collectively the novels provide a reflection, often in terms of more than a single static image, of British imperial culture after empire, contesting, and reinterpreting perceptions of the historical moment of the British Empire and its legacy in contemporary culture.It is my thesis that the body of Booker Prize winning novels from 1969 to 1995 narrates the ending of British Empire and the emergence of different cultural formations in its aftermath. This idea is pursued in the seven chapt~s of the thesis which discretely explore groups of novels which deal with aspects of the transition from empire to a post-imperial culture-the stages from early imperial expansion, to colonisation, to retrenchment, decolonisation and post-colonial pessimism, to the emergence of tribal nationalisms and postimperial nation-states in the aftermath of empire. Throughout this thesis the focus is primarily literary and contingently cultural.

Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

“…It is in this cultural context of flattened non-whiteness that the success of an author from India writing about India draws interest to the work of a novelist who had grown up in Surrey, England, because of his (according to the author) "Japanese face" and "Japanese name" (Vorda and Herzinger 1991:134-35). In this formulation, women were not so much tokenized as they were "edged out" (Tuchman and Fortin 1989), as the domestic novel (in both senses of the word) was marginalized as passé and in creative decline (Strongman 2002). 17 The broader cultural foundations of the context also affected the shape this tokenism took.…”

“…Modeled after the French Prix Goncourt, the original English-language Booker was intended to drum up interest and promote "serious" fiction in the United Kingdom at a time when the book trade was in relative decline (Huggan 2002;Squires 2004). It did so by consolidating global literature written in English that was not from the United States, as a countermove against the rising global dominance of U.S. publishers (Kalliney 2013;Strongman 2002;Todd 1996).…”

“…Our data come from a period in which literary prizes emerged as a central tool to promote multiculturalism (Corse and Griffin 1997;English 2009;Grossman et al 2021;Lauter 1991;Nishikawa 2021;Sapiro 2016), leading to, at least in the United States, "the valorization of a handful of black authors" (So 2020:11, emphasis added). For the British publishing industry, promoting the work of "writers from elsewhere" (Manferlotti 1995) emerged as a countermove against the rising global dominance of U.S. publishers (Kalliney 2013;Strongman 2002;Todd 1996), and as a mark of "discernment" and "diversity capital" (Banks 2022) for publishers and the "British educated middle-class" (Donnelly 2015:49). Under the canopy of this cultural context, and given that tokenism, "as an institution," can "have advantages both for the dominant group and for the individual who is chosen to serve as Token" (Laws 1975:51-52), our first hypothesis is as follows:…”

Tokenism and its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

“…Modeled after the French Prix Goncourt, the original English-language Booker was intended to drum up interest and promote "serious" fiction in the United Kingdom at a time when the book trade was in relative decline (Huggan 2002;Squires 2004). More centrally, however, it did so by consolidating global literature written in English that was not from the United States as a counter-move against the rising global dominance of U.S. publishers (Kalliney 2013;Strongman 2002;Todd 1996).…”

“…Our data occur during a time period in which literary prizes emerged as a central tool to promote multiculturalism (Corse and Griffin 1997;English 2009;Grossman et al 2021;Lauter 1991;Nishikawa 2021;Sapiro 2016) leading to, at least in the United States, "the valorization of a handful of black authors" (So 2020: 11, emphases added). At the same time, for the British publishing industry promoting the work of "writers from elsewhere" (Manferlotti 1995) emerged not only as a counter-move against the rising global dominance of U.S. publishers (Kalliney 2013;Strongman 2002;Todd 1996), but also as a mark of "discernment," and "diversity capital" (Banks 2022) for both publishers and the "British educated middle-class" (Donnelly 1995: 49).…”