Pastoral synecdoche can erase colonial and industrial space from national identity

Evidence

E. M. Forster, Howard’ s End (1910; repr., New York, 1975). This is an illuminating novel to read alongside the Naipaul and the Kincaid. Although imperial spaces trouble the edges of Howard’s End, Forster anxiously seeks to screen out their implications by advancing a pastorally contained vision of English regeneration. In a key scene, the narrator stands on a Dorset hilltop gazing down at what he defines as a quintessential English vista. His angle of vision is akin to what Mary Louise Pratt, in an imperial context, calls the monarch-of-all-I-survey. In keeping with this tradition, Forster’s method is panoramic: he creates a verbal painting that allows him to symbolically consume all of England at a glance in the surrogate, pastoral form of the Isle of Wight. Gazing steadfastly at the Isle of Wight “the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographical and encircles England” (102). This scene’s visual geometry, one might say, is one of panoramic bioregionalism.In this passage, the Isle of Wight, with its grassy downs and chalky cliffs, becomes England’s epitome and the guardian “till the end of time” of the nation’s “purity.” This act of synecdoche shrinks England to a nonhybrid nation of hyperpastoral. Forster thus performs here a kind of political and spatial amnesia, using a visual act of geographical circumscription to generate a highly selective notion of nationhood. By having the Isle of Wight stand in for England, Forster excludes the working classes and the polluted cities of the nation’s industrial north, as well as London, with its expansive cosmopolitan matrices. Crucially, for my larger argument about postcolonial pastoral, Forster’s vision excises colonial space from the idea of England: Cyprus and Nigeria, flickering on the edges of the novel, have no visible relation to the Isle of Wight. In this manner, Forster deploys geographical synecdoche and panoramic pastoral to foreclose from the idea of England, people, places, and histories that unsettle the book’s project of selective national regeneration and redefinition. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1347

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Nixon’s ch5 note on the writer-activist as translator and ch53’s bioregional spiritual geography critique — the monarch-of-all-I-survey optical stance recurs as imperial method; also relevant to Soundscape’s listening-position politics. — connects to: Eco-tourist refuges erase the segregated histories that created them — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 523; Bioregional spiritual geography forgets the transnational harms America causes — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 730; Colonial identity construction disavows subaltern histories that cultural translation work must restore — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 857
• ADDENDUM: Extends ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s land-as-infrastructure thread into how pastoral landscape optics can be an instrument of selective erasure akin to planning maps.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘panoramic bioregionalism’ and ‘geographical synecdoche’ as named techniques for how selective place-imagery operates.

Broader Connections

• Colonial identity construction disavows subaltern histories that cultural translation work must restore #corroborates (0.82) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 857