Decorative Self Works of Flora Annie Steel: A Study of Imperialism

Pages:30-31
Pallavi (Department of English, GJU S&T, Hisar, Haryana)

In her time she was known as the “female Rudyard Kipling,” but while Kipling’s life and work are still discussed and read, Flora Steel’s life and work have been largely forgotten. Imperialism, as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and other commentators have described it, is a mapping of cultural and geographical territory employing an ideology of possession and control. Viewed historically, its modern dimensions are commonly seen as extending roughly from Columbus’ “discovery” of the American to the nationalist liberatory politics of the pre and post-WWII nation-state configuration. In influence and sheer acquisitiveness, Britain is seen to have played the largest role. Whether decolonization has marked some sort of end to imperialism and the closely related phenomenon of colonialism, so that imperialism can be consigned to history from a “post-colonial” position, is open to debate. Nevertheless, it seems clear that “history” marks the present and that the impulse to imperialism has found different ways to produce the same effects. Geographical and cultural imperialism and colonialism may still be very much alive in the transitional corporatism described by Masao Miyoshi or in the maximizing, extractive, “separating, dominating and reactive” tendencies which continue to structure Western concepts and practices of knowledge production.