How postcolonial melancholy manifests in contemporary British screen productions: two examples examined
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2019-07-03
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en
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This thesis looks into how the Victorians viewed the relations the British Empire had with both India and Ireland and compares their views with how these perspectives are portrayed in two contemporary British screen productions: Victoria & Abdul (2017) and the episode Faith, Hope and Charity (2017) from the second season of the ITV series Victoria (2016). It poses the following question: do contemporary cinematic representations of India’s and Ireland’s relationship accurately portray the way the Irish and Indians were actually viewed in that specific timeframe? Ireland as colony has been selected because its peculiar position in the colonial world has divided scholars in the field of Irish studies and postcolonial studies. India has been selected because it has a far less ambiguous position as a colony of the British Empire. In order to grasp how the Victorians viewed these colonies, writings and cartoons from that era are discussed. Current popular opinion in Britain seems to be positive and even nostalgic towards the idea of having an empire. Research by scholars, such as Paul Gilroy and Wayne Modest & Anouk de Koning, have shown that this nostalgia lies at the heart of much of the ‘anxious politics’ seen in the Western world today. The Guardian even argues that these sentiments have given the world Brexit because of a longing for the greatness Britain held when it was still a global empire. This thesis explores whether these sentiments of postcolonial melancholy have permeated expressions of popular culture such as contemporary screen productions. The theoretical framework this thesis uses in order to analyse this screen productions centres around three concepts: imperial ‘othering’, postcolonial melancholy and cultural memory. The study has found that although the views portrayed in these productions acknowledge feelings of guilt towards Britain’s colonial past, they still shows signs of postcolonial melancholy in some elements, particularly in the matriarchical depictions of Queen Victoria.
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