A message from the Chair
Officially the centenary of The Round Table journal (started in the Edwardian era) did not start until 2010. But the preparations, started ahead of time.
And I thought it would be good to provide a monthly update for readers and supporters of our journal, starting in July 2009 after my re-election for a final year as Chair of the editorial advisory board, (known since the early twentieth century as the Moot).
Richard Bourne
View the messages by selecting any of the links below:
June 2010
A big difference between two post-colonial associations-la Francophonie and the Commonwealth-is that the first began as a cultural and linguistic body, while the second has its roots in politics and economics. The Francophone world in the second half of the twentieth century was battling against the growing hegemony of the English language. The Commonwealth could take the language issue for granted, thanks as much to the United States, TV and Hollywood as to post-imperial English teaching, but was grappling with difficult struggles over racism, unequal trade and its own aspirations to democracy and human rights.
But of course the imperial aftermath continues to affect both colonised and colonisers, not only through the 700 South Asian words which have recently entered the Oxford English Dictionary, and the current debate about the role of the British Empire in the British history syllabus. A Cumberland Lodge colloquium this month, part of the Round Table's centenary series, was called "Empire and Me: Personal Recollections of Imperialism in Reality and Imagination". It showed how many writers and critics-such as Marina Warner whose St Kitts-born cricketing grandfather, Sir Pelham "Plum" Warner is venerated at Lords-continue to be affected by cultural aftershocks.
In the week of Lord Saville's report it was good to be reminded, by Margaret Busby and Cameron Duodu, that the shooting dead of two Ghanaians in 1948, in a protest by ex-servicemen in Accra, propelled Kwame Nkrumah's "positive action" campaign for independence. At the same time Diran Adebayo, a British novelist and critic with Nigerian parents, told the colloquium that in his own thinking the colonial experience has been superseded. This raised the question of whether the imperial legacy will inevitably fade even though, like the Roman road network in Britain, it will leave physical and psychic traces.
Is today's Commonwealth still coasting on the wash of dead imperial engines? Is it merely what Sir Peter Marshall once described as "the after-sales service of the Empire"? Or has it sufficient coherence and modernity to promote unique connections in a globalised era? Writers and critics often have a better sense of value than politicians or economists. These were not the questions they were asked, but maybe Cumberland Lodge can return to them another year.
Richard Bourne