This book explores the political co-operations and textual connections which linked anti-colonial, nationalist, and modernist groups and individuals in the British empire. Boehmer significantly questions prevailing postcolonial paradigms of the self-defining nation, syncretism and mimicry, and dismantles still-dominant binary definitions of the colonial relationship.

• Acknowledgements


• 1: Anti-imperial interaction across the colonial borderline: Introduction, The Irish Boer War and The United Irishman.


• 2: India the starting point: cross-national self-translation in 1900s Calcutta.


• 3: 'But Transmitters'?: The interdiscursive alliance of Aurobindo Ghose and Sister Nivedita.


• 4: 'Able to sing their songs': Solomon Plaatje's many-tongued nationalism.


• 5: 'Immeasurable strangeness' between empire and modernism: W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore, and Leonard Woolf.


• Bibliography


• Index

Elleke Boehmer is Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Nottingham Trent University, and author of Colonial Literature (1995), and three novels: Screens Against the Sky (1990), An Immaculate Figure (1993), and Bloodlines (2000).