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Emma Parker, "Life Writing and the End of Empire: Homecoming in Autobiographical Narratives" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
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- [00:00]
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Welcome to the New Books Network
- [01:21]
Ibrahim Fauzi
hello everyone, and welcome back to a new episode on New Books Network. I'm your host Ibrahim Fauzi, and today we will be discussing a fascinating new book that explores how the End of Empire continues to shape personal memory and literary identity. Our guest today is guess Emma Parker, author of Life Writing and the End of Empire Homecoming and Autobiographical Narratives, published by Glob spree academic in 2024. Emma, welcome to the New Box Network.
- [01:49]
Emma Parker
Thank you so much, Ibrahim. It's lovely to be here.
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Ibrahim Fauzi
I usually love to ask about the origin of the book. Your book examines the relationship between life writing and the end of the British Empire. Could you begin by telling us how this project first started and what drew you to the topic of autobiographical narratives in relation to Empire?
- [02:10]
Emma Parker
Yeah, sure, no problem. So I started this project over a decade ago. I had a strange year of life where I was reading an unhealthy amount of memoirs, and it was partly because I was a postgrad student and I'd just taken a course on reading literary autobiography. So I'm kind of obsessively reading in the aftermath of this a lot of different life narratives and I started noticing this set piece scene that cropped up in multiple autobiographies that I'd read, which is when the author had grown up in a former colony of the British Empire, and then, as they often would, would travel at some point as an adult into Britain. They would have this description of getting off the docks, having often arrived by a long boat journey, and being genuinely horrified by the Britain that they saw on their arrival. That's what in post colonial studies is sometimes called daffodil syndrome, which is that you've had a colonial education that draws on, like the poetry of Wordsworth and the novels of Thomas Hardy, and you're expecting a kind of soft focus landscape of Britishness and what you find as a post industrial, climactically, quite depressing, often sort of interminable drizzle and a complicated modern nation. And so I was kind of interested. I was like, okay, I keep seeing this set piece scene that's so interesting once you get past the initial humor of it. How fascinating that so many people's lives have shared this coordinate. And then the turning point for me was seeing that same scene in the New Zealand writer Janet Frame's autobiographies and me just being like, oh, wow, Frame is arriving in Britain in the late 50s. That's quite late to be seeing yourself as a colonial arrival. And I didn't really think of New Zealand as part of the empire at that time because New Zealand ceases to become part of the British Empire in the early 1900s. And to be really crude, Frame is white and she's not seen as different by a lot of Brits. New Zealand is seen as more English than the English. Right. So it's like, oh, this is so interesting that she too had that space kind of moment of estrangement, just like Nigerians like Buchi Emma Chetta had had, and South Africans and Indians and Caribbean people. Obviously it's not the same, but that was for me. Okay, I want to look a bit closer at white authors. Ties to the former empire and authors who might not be seen by the British is necessarily immediately different. And I thought, especially writers like Frame who came quite late in the 20th century to Britain, I was like, maybe they're going to allow me to think about modern Britain's relationship to imperial memory. So I might use these writers as an inn, if that makes sense. So, yeah, I'm going to blame it all on Janet Frame.
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Ibrahim Fauzi
Yeah, perfect. And my second question is, at the heart of the book is the idea that the end of Empire didn't simply mark historical closure, but continues to shape cultural memory and identity. Could you explain this central argument for the benefit of our listeners?
- [05:10]
Emma Parker
Thank you for Asking that question, I think it's good to caveat saying the end of empire from a historical perspective is this distinct, if unwieldy moment in British history. So it's the era of formal decolonization, and we could argue about what are exact coordinates, but in one way, end of empire is a period in time. Maybe we could imagine a timeline that spans Indian independence, 1947, the Suez crisis as a loss of British imperial confidence in 1956, Zimbabwean independence, 1980. Shockingly late, I always think, maybe all the way through to the handover of Hong Kong, 1997. So that is like the historical period that we could talk about. But, and I'm by no means the first person to say this, that the end of empire is also a process, and it's an ongoing process for many communities across the globe. And the legacies of empire that span out into its end are, like, messy, and they're complex, and they continue to be violent and experienced deeply, unequally. One of the examples I use in the book is that in the 21st century, I'm going to say 2007, I think I'm right. Doris Lessing in the UK, who's seen as a very British writer by this point, wins the Nobel Prize for fiction, arguably the biggest literary prize on the planet. And when she gives one of her many acceptance speeches in the National Gallery in London, she mentions that she has always been wanting to work her writing back to her Zimbabwean, then Rhodesian childhood, that she is thinking constantly of having grown up as a white person in Africa in the 1920s and 30s. And I'm like, there you have it. The memories of empire erupting in the National Gallery, in the noughties, in unexpected places. And my point is, like, the end of empire is not a discrete period confined to the past. It's kind of like a lingering presence, especially in modern British life. And it's there even in, like, a Nobel Laureate speech. But I could give lots of other examples. But, yeah, so it's a discrete period, but it's also an ongoing process.
- [07:18]
Ibrahim Fauzi
That's interesting. And why life writing? Because I'm interested in memoirs and creative nonfiction in general, and I wrote my MA thesis on political prison memoirs. So I want to know more about why you choose to focus on life writing.
- [07:37]
Emma Parker
Yeah, life writing. Life writing is different to fiction, right? I mean, you will know this so well. Listeners will know this if we pick up a memoir, and lots of us are like, secret lovers of memoirs and personal life narratives, there's a different set of expectations between the reader and the author. A French theorist called Philippe Lejeune calls this the autobiographical pact. So it's basically like an assumption that when you open the pages of the memoir, you are entering into a bond with its author where they are trying, to the best of their ability, to give you a true story. And we could argue about the details, and I'm paraphrasing Le Jeune, but there is this pact with memoir writing. And, dear listeners, if you want a chuckle, go away and look up a guy called James Frey, an American memoirist who, in the early noughties, broke the pact and it turned out he'd lied in his memoir of addiction and recovery. And his readership, which was significant, was so upset he had to go on Oprah and apologise, and his publisher had to offer refunds to anyone who bought the book and felt personally let down. That is so interesting, because many memoir writers lie and embellish, but it shows the Fray case that there's still this expectation of truth. Right? So that's how memoir writing is obviously different to fiction. What comes across in my book, and I don't say it as explicitly as I should, but is that I think memoir writing can benefit, just like fiction can, from literary analysis. A memoir is not like a direct line of someone's life, it is edited. There are aesthetic choices, there are complications of genre. People think about experimental form and what kind of form do they want their life narrative to take? So I really think life writing can benefit from close textual analysis. So a life narrative is as crafted as a novel in many ways. And then my last point is, yeah, that memoir writing is kind of uniquely equipped to show us as readers that the end of Empire that we were just talking about, right. This process, this ongoing process, is messy and it's ongoing and it's really intimate. It's really personal. It's not just about public history, it's about how the legacies of colonialism affect people's personal lives. And thinking about examples, one I draw on in the book is The English writer J.G. ballard, a cult figure in England, if you haven't read him, is a dystopian writer, and he lived in a really unremarkable suburb of London, directly under the flight path for Heathrow. So not like a fancy neighborhood, very similar to the sort of 1930s neighborhoods I grew up in. And he is really clear. It's called Shepparton. The neighborhood he's like. My life in Shepparton was always underwritten by my childhood in colonial Shanghai. And so there's this sense that memoir writing can take us really deep into people's personal histories and even their homes, which I think we'll talk about later. And it shows us how these colonial legacies lodge deep in everyday life, each even for the white populace of Britain, who might often think otherwise, that empire doesn't affect their lives. So, yeah, I think life writing is uniquely equipped to talk to us about colonialism's legacies.
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Ibrahim Fauzi
Yeah, I agree, and I second that. And I want you to teach me more about postcolonial theory and life writing. How do they intersect and speak to each other?
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Emma Parker
Yeah, I'm not a theorist and I have colleagues who might be better equipped to respond to the theoretical element of that. But what I would say is that you can see that the two disciplines, life writing and postcolonial studies, are speaking to each other in the sheer number of memoirs by postcolonial theorists. It's so clear, right? The great Edward Said, the founder of post colonial studies, in lots of ways, has a wonderful memoir out of place, which you must surely know. Ibrahim, and I'm sure lots of listeners will know too, with that famous description of himself as a cluster of flowing currents to describe his diasporic life as a Palestinian in exile. And Sarasota, another foundational figure in post colonial studies, writes a family memoir, Meatless Day is really good, about the partition of India, Pakistan and its impact on her family's life. Bit more locally to me. Bartmore Gilbert, great post colonial thinker in Britain, sadly, the late Baltimore Gilbert wrote a memoir about his father being a white police officer in India, and he thinks about complicity and father son relations. It's called the Setting Sun. So there's clearly this relation between life and thought in postcolonial studies, and postcolonial theorists are very willing to think through and embrace that. The question of why, which is implicit, I'm still figuring out. But I've recently had another look over Stuart Hall's wonderful memoir, Familiar Stranger, the great Jamaican British intellectual which came out about 10 years ago now. And in Familiar Stranger, he says essentially that Empire was a totalizing narrative enforced upon its subjects, and that it's a narrative of Western imperial progress towards the idea of so called civilization. And that's part of the violence of empire, that it's a homogenizing, flattening out narrative, if you like, one size fits all. And then if I think about what hall is doing as a memoir writer, it's like a resistance to that. It's like by writing your own life and your family's life and thinking about colonial legacies on the personal level, it's a resistance to that totalizing narrative. So that might be part of the really productive relationship between autobiography and postcolonial theory. It's a way of resisting empire's totality. I'm still thinking that through and I'd like to write more on that, so I'll come back to you.
- [13:22]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Yeah, and I look forward to reading more about that from you. So, also, sorry. When people raise the colonial context, Ravenbrand, expect it to be home, but experience a profound sense of displacement. You called it, like you termed it homecoming. Could you elaborate on this idea, the idea of colonial homecoming?
- [13:45]
Emma Parker
Yeah, it's something I. So, you know, we were just talking about, like, how did the project begin? And I'm sure people listening will know what it's like to realize, like, I've started a book and now I have to finish it. And it's an awful feeling of, like, no one is going to come help you. You just have to do it. And when I was really struggling to finish this book, I was like, how do I open? And I thought, I'm going to go back to the start of this process. I'm going to open the book with the anecdotes of arrival, with what each of my key authors thought about Britain when they first stepped foot on these shores. So I started the book with these arrivals, and I basically say these arrivals are misleading because they might make you think that's the end of the relation to the colonial past. The arrival in Britain marks the end of empire, but actually it marks the beginning because all of the authors that I discuss wrote many life narratives where they try to go home to their memories of the colonial past. So it's the homecoming that reveals how the end of empire is this ongoing process. So after the arrival comes the many homecomings, comes the many memoirs that follow. And they're by nature frustrated. Right, because you can't get back. You can't get back to the colonial past after formal decolonisation. That is kind of the point. So Britain both was and was not their home because they were always trying to return to a home that no longer existed. And, yeah, just a brief aside, I kind of mentioned it in the intro. But, you know, in the uk there have been really heated debates about the state of the nation's homes in recent years, by which I mean stately properties that are managed on behalf of the nation by heritage organizations and the collaboration between academic researchers and these properties who say, we want to, like, spotlight our colonial history, and we want to talk about how our previous owners got so rich, often from the benefits of the transatlantic slave trade. It sometimes feels like parts of British society have lost their head at the idea of doing this, at the idea of drawing out these stories. And it's made me realize it's because they're homes, these places. They are like homes of the nation repositories. They're not just dwelling places, they are national spaces. And it's so personal when it comes to. Even if it's not your home, it's like Winston Churchill's birthplace or whatever. So this sense of homecoming to me also has so much to tell us about the UK and how we understand public private homes and their connections to empire and how touchy it all is. Yeah, it's a contentious topic in Britain.
- [16:12]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Yeah. And because I'm also interested in what connects your selected writers. I mean, you selected some writers on a criteria. What connects these writers and why did you choose them as your central case studies?
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Emma Parker
Yeah. Well, I think it's really good to embrace the difficulty straight away that I chose these authors in part because they're white, and I was really interested in whiteness. And I was interested in focusing on white authors who aren't necessarily associated with Britain's colonial past, authors who might have been subsumed into British life. And I wanted to spotlight how they can benefit as much from postcolonial analysis as men and women literary figures of color who get subjected to it, whether they kind of agree with it or not. So I was interested in whiteness, and I gestured towards it earlier, but didn't say it. I'm also really interested in people who rewrote their lives. So not just one memoir, but many. So that process of homecoming plays out over multiple texts, trying to get home and experimenting. Travel memoirs, autobiographies, speculative memoirs, auto fiction. So this restless play with form. I'm also interested in people from peripheral zones in the empire. So place not like jewels in the colonial crown, like India, but more indeterminate spaces like Egypt. Then a British protectorate like on the Southern Rhodesia, which was a renegade colony, broke from the British Empire in 1960, but continued white supremacy, was then successfully dismantled by a guerrilla war and turned into Zimbabwe. But still renegade empires, former empires like former empires, former colonies like Aotearoa, New Zealand, and, yeah, strange extraterritorial zones like the Shanghai International Settlement, which is a space of empire, but not formally part. So that was also a connection for me. So white authors, he rewrote their colonial childhoods many times, but who had grown up in poor for all zones. That's the kind of criteria.
- [18:25]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Amazing. I really loved your criteria. And let's talk now about the chapters. In your chapter on Pennyloop Lively, you discuss how her memories of growing up in Egypt shaped her autobiographical writing. What does your work reveal about Nel childhood and the spatial structures of empire? And let's talk about Egypt and all this stuff.
- [18:50]
Emma Parker
If you are listening to this and you aren't that familiar with Penelope Lively, that's fine. She's a Booker Prize winning novelist based in England. She has a reputation for being the most quintessential of English authors. She's written for both adults and children, produced many novels and five memoirs to date. Despite the reputation for being so very English, she didn't grow up in England, as Ibrahim and I are alluding to. She grew up in Cairo and was born in Cairo in the 1930s. Had a very lonely childhood, I think it's fair to say super privileged and super lonely. She grows up in a grand house on the outskirts of Cairo. Her family's home was serviced by a bevy of local servants. She describes it as an island marooned in the landscape. I would describe it as like an island of whiteness. So we have this kind of isolated late colonial world. But Lively's memoirs, especially her first memoir, Oleander Jacaranda. And if you're listening and you think I might want to read some Penelope Lively, that would be a great place to start. It's kind of this glittering memoir of a colonial childhood. Oleander Jacaranda subjects her kind of childhood to what she calls a double vision, which I would read not just as the child's perspective in the adult's hindsight, but it's a kind of, if we thought about it through a writer like Frantz Fanon, who famously in the Wretched of the Earth, makes the distinction between the settler's town and the natives quarters. It's like even the young Lively kind of knows that she's in the settler's town and she knows what that means, that there's like another world just out of sight, out of her vision. Something else is beyond the boundary of the property in the garden and she's kind of disturbed by it and she's disturbed by her own relation in this imperial sphere. I could say more about Live View, but just the one example from Hollyander Jacaranda that I find so interesting is there's a very short vignette where she says, in the basement of my parents house was a space I was very frightened of because the desert had sprung up under the house, the basement had a sandy floor, and the desert is supposed to be this other frightening space beyond the property limits. And on the one hand it's very normal for a child to be afraid of the basement in a property, but on the other, it's like the house is literally built on sand and the foundations are unstable and it's like the basement of the house is like an hourglass falling up the sun. It's like she knows that time is running out on this world. And so that sense of unease that spreaded through the memoir, I think makes it a bit more interesting than just like imperial nostalgia. It's actually a really telling example of how uneasy many white settlers in the late colonial period were with this sort of like supposedly grand world they were inhabiting. So yeah, I find Lively fascinating for lots of reasons, and I find that double vision really productive as a line of inquiry. So go away and read Ollie under Jack around the listeners if you haven't already.
- [21:54]
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- [22:24]
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- [23:10]
Ibrahim Fauzi
And this leads me to the second to the next question. Because your chapter on Ballard is beautiful, particularly in the way it connects the colonial house in Shanghai with the internment camp. He experienced it during the war how do these spaces reshape our understanding of his biographical writing?
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Emma Parker
Yeah, JG Ballard has a very similar upbringing to Lively in lots of ways, which might sound weird because they grew up thousands of miles apart, but it's a very similar world. It's a grand house that he grows up in in the International Settlement. The International Settlement in Shanghai is an extraterritorial space of empire, so only Europeans can own property there. Even though it's on the Chinese mainland. It's kind of like a foothold for British imperial power in Asia. And, you know, Bala grows up with like a chauffeur and a nanny. And unlike Lively, he's very frank that he, like, didn't see the local servants who serviced the house as, like, people. It's completely a dehumanising relation for him. So he's like an archetypal colonial child in lots of ways. His colonial childhood is often said to have come to a shocking end when the Japanese invaded China during the Second World War. And he and his family get rounded up and put in an internment camp. So they go from this grand. In the uk, we call it like a Surrey stockbroker style house. It's like these incredibly sorry listeners, ugly houses outside of London that are owned by very wealthy men who work in the city. Ballard grew up in one of those, but in China, Weird. And then he gets thrown in a place called Lunghua Internment Camp, which is not the same as a concentration camp. If you're listening and thinking, like, what does that mean? It's not a place for extinguishing life, but preserving it in its meanest form. So he and his family are living in a very small concrete lined room in Lunghua for two years. There's some basic provisions, but life there is quite challenging. And it's always been said that. It's often been said that Ballard embellished his memories of Lunghua, that it wasn't as bad as he said. But I went to the archives in the British Library and I got up the records for the camp and it looked pretty grim to me, to be honest. Everyone there was on starvation rations for at least a year. That's like 1,200 calories a day for a teenage boy. That must have been excruciating. It's also clear that people in the camp thought they were going to be shot by the Japanese when they surrendered at the end of the Second World War. So I was like, I actually don't think ballad embellished quite as much as people said. I think this was a terrible experience. And he comes back to, as you were just saying, in all of his life writing, all of his life writing returns to the big house and the camp. And my point of reading them is that they're not as separate as they might seem. It's actually not a rupture. The two spaces are like twins in his writing. The house and the camp are inseparable. And, you know, they're both enclaves, they're both inhabited by Europeans, they're both bordered zones. And so, yeah, I think there's some connections. And returning to the house and camp for Ballard is all about returning to the trauma of what British imperial power drain away. This is all about watching Britain's authority seed at the end of empire. So it's not just about war and displacement and personal wealth. This is a wider comment on decolonization being a traumatic experience for its white subjects who have been empire's beneficiaries before its end. You could say so much more about ballad, but I feel like I have to, yeah, stop the ballad now.
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Ibrahim Fauzi
Yeah, but we can listen to you for long, so talk as much as you can. Because I really learn a lot about life writing and post colonialism, things that I want to work on, maybe later or read about more about or teach. So. And now I move to Doris Lessing's reading because how, How, I want to ask, how does Doris Lissing's writing grapple with the contradictions of settler identity and the end of empire?
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Emma Parker
Yeah, Lessing more so than any other author I discuss in this book. Her life writing is completely defined by the contradictions of settler identity. Like it's. It's the engine that fuels her life writing project. So Doris Lessing publishes across her very long career, I think almost a dozen autobiographical narratives, autobiographical novels, memoirs, travel logs, documentary fictions, what I call speculative life writing, where she rewrites her own life with alternative outcomes. It's almost obsessive. And all of her life writing is propelled by this urge to go home to her childhood, which was in what was known as Southern Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe, this landlocked southern African country shaped like a kind of teapot that borders South Africa. And she is always trying to get back, specifically, not just to Southern Rhodesia, settler life, but really specifically to the farm her parents owned in the colony that they were given access to as British subjects. And she calls the farm my myth country. There's a quote in one of her documentary, how you describe In Pursuit of the English documentary Memoir, maybe, where she says, I've lived in over 50 addresses but I've never felt at home since I left the House on the Hill. So it's like she's always trying to get back there. And my interest in Lessing is like, this is a totally absurd desire on her part. She was one of the most vociferous critics of colonialism in Britain throughout her entire career. Her refusal letter, when she's offered an obe, an order of the British Empire is, like, spectacular. She writes back to the Prime Minister's secretary saying, like, what empire? What empire are you going to make me a dame of? I'd love to be a dame, but I can't be a dame of an empire. So it's kind of absurd that this great anti imperial thinker is always trying to get home to a white settler childhood. Rhodesia was an apartheid state, you know, it was extreme and brutal in its racism and its deference to colonial values. So absurd for Lessing to be moving back there. There's also this great contradiction in her life writing because the House on the Hill that she's trying to get back to. I went to the Harry Ransom center in Texas, and I got to see the original photos of this house that Lessing was so very obsessed with. And they're amazing, from the 1920s. And they show a structure with mud walls and a thatched roof. And it looks so temporary, like it's hewn from natural materials. It's really obvious that the house was only meant to last a season or two. And the whole reason her family lived in it for two decades is because they failed as farmers. They couldn't afford brick and mortar to build a proper farmhouse. So, yeah, there's this real sense that it's so contradictory for Lessing to be seeing the house as a place to go back to because it was a deeply temporary sense space. And at the same time, she doesn't want a memorial to Empire and a memorial to white settler life. So she doesn't want, like, a heritage site that people could go visit. So it's fascinating that her life writing is propelled by this contradiction. And I would just say, as a literary scholar, okay, like, Lessing couldn't resolve her relationship to the colonial past, but that was really productive from a literary perspective because she kept experimenting with different autobiographical forms. Like, maybe this style of memoir will allow me to resolve it. Maybe this. So I think, yeah, it was a productive contradiction. It was unresolved. By the end of her long career, several Lessing scholars said that her final book, Alfred and Emily, was a resolution. I would strongly disagree. There is no way of resolving her relation to Southern Rhodesia. So, yeah, lessing's a contradictory force, but fascinating also.
- [31:17]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Yes, and I think we mentioned the word house quite a lot and it's also mentioned in the book. So one of the most striking ideas of the book is your attention to domestic space as a site where imperial power was both constructed and remembered. Why are these domestic spaces so important to understanding the after? Like Zo Empire?
- [31:46]
Emma Parker
Yeah, well, if imperial historians discuss houses and domestic space, they tend to say, and rightly so, they tend to say that domestic space was like a microcosm for the empire in miniature, for white colonial communities. So you can see this in the guidebooks distributed to white housewives in India, even actually child rearing manuals distributed to white women across the British Empire. Like, domestic space must be ordered, it must reflect, I would say, like white supremacist values, it must be clean. And therefore the future of the empire is secure. What I find, though, if you read late colonial memoirs, I mean, Oleander Jacaranda is a great example. Domestic space is often, for settlers, the place where empire comes undone, where colonial order seems to break down. Domestic space is deeply unsettling. Think of that basement under the house filling with sand, so scary to the white colonial child. Think of J.G. ballard. The most famous recurring image in Ballard's writing is an empty swimming pool, which he saw all across the International Settlement when he was being rounded up and put in the camp. Like imperial power draining away into the soil, this nice white life collapsing. I think domestic space is a place for revealing empire's frailties and its fracture lines. And that's partly why it's so interesting in, yeah, post imperial and late colonial life writing. You can see domestic space is not as inviolable as we may have thought.
- [33:15]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Yeah, well, we cannot go without asking about Janet's Frame because your chapters on Janet's Frame explores questions of homelessness and belonging in a settler colonial contest. How does Frame challenge the idea of stable colonial identity?
- [33:35]
Emma Parker
Yeah, I have no problem confessing that my chapter on Frame almost undid me in terms of my resolve. And I spent maybe four times longer trying to write that chapter than any other in the book. So make of that what you will. The quote I clung onto when I was writing on Frame is a line in her autobiographies which says, I suffered from a profound homelessness of the self. So I kept coming back to that. This homelessness of the self. I have to just very briefly explain. If you haven't come across Janet Frame before, she is often cited as New Zealand's most important national author. So Eotero, New Zealand's national literary figure, would agree with that. But perhaps it's also important to know that this homelessness of the self idea has always been seen as reflecting the very notorious fact that Janet Frame was incarcerated in former lunatic asylums for 10 years. During her 20s. She was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, she was not schizophrenic. And she was put in these institutions and sometimes put herself back in these institutions. When she would leave, she would end up back. It's a kind of tragic cycle because she felt she had nowhere else to go. So I can see how that homelessness comment might be read within the notorious asylum experiences. They are so shocking. And if you want to go away and read some Frame, her autobiographies are amazing. But, you know, it comes with the warning that the asylum scenes are completely heartbreaking. She had a lot of electroconvulsive shock therapy essay and inverted commas, so, you know, she really suffered from those experiences. But for me, this focus on homelessness, it's not only about the asylum, it's not only about what was done to Frame, but it's actually. It's kind of like a political position that she develops over time. And it's a political position that she thinks about in relation to New Zealand being a post settler society, being sort of like a settler culture. And she increasingly, in her writing, you can see it in the autobiographies, but you can also actually see it in the novels, which is interesting. After the 1960s, she starts writing about how she associates home ownership in New Zealand with. With a kind of modern white settler, and she doesn't want to be involved in it. To own property is to be compromised in some way. And so, yeah, she develops this post imperial critique of property ownership and she doesn't wish to be involved. And of course, there are historical connections between. Property ownership is the engine that drives empire in lots of ways. It's why settlers move out of Britain and go abroad, because often quite impoverished communities in the UK were promised, you can have land for cheap and you can build a house there. So I think actually it's a really compelling argument that Framers is making. And she was a very clever woman. It's an intellectual argument that to be homeless is like a generative position and it's a way out of a kind of like locked settler identity that she doesn't want any part of. And she definitely develops that she's been incarcerated and she has great sympathy with various communities who are also unhoused, like mentally unwell people, like servants who live in hotels and live, you know, in tiny rooms above the hotels and dispossessed Mori communities increasingly, as her writing goes on. So I just think, yeah, I think Framers, she has a kind of politics of homelessness, which I find really interesting. And I do think she can be read through a kind of post collection colonial analysis. Challenging a writer, though. She is, and she is very challenging. Yeah, I take a lot from Frame and if you want to go and read her, I strongly recommend the autobiographies. They're wonderful.
- [37:23]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Perfect. And my final question because. Because time flow by is what's next? What are you currently working on?
- [37:33]
Emma Parker
Oh, yeah, that's nice. Thank you for asking. So when I finished the book, I wasn't really done with some of these authors, so I've recently written a bit more on Doris Lessing and published it in a book about life writing in the Southern hemisphere. I also, for my sins, decided I had to mark Janet Frame's centenary, which was two years ago, with a big collection of essays that's just come out on Frame. So janet frame at 150, but then going forwards. Yeah, a few things. And please, if you listen and any of these interests chime with you, please get in touch with me. I would love to talk more, but I want to write on the Imperial Archive in life writing, and I would really like to think about how contemporary memorists describe their own journey through the Imperial Archive and how they use documents from Imperial Archives. It's something I'm increasingly interested in, so I'm hoping. I'm currently on maternity leave, so I have exactly no time, but I'm hoping at some point I might have more time and I can think on that. I also started a new book project about a year ago through some archival research of my own at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. So I'm wanting to extend this interest in post Imperial Britain and arrivals. And I would like to write eventually a book about some South African women who fled apartheid and rocked up in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century. And I would like to write a kind of group study. I don't know if I should even say this. I'm not sure I want it to be an academic book. I'm still figuring that out and still deciding. So, yeah, I've got stuff on the Imperial Archive and I'm thinking a lot at the minute about colonial history and the importance of political exile in modern South Africa. So if anyone's listening and has similar interests, I would love to hear from you. Or if you have research you want to share with me, get in touch and I'd love to talk more.
- [39:28]
Ibrahim Fauzi
Wonderful. And I'm looking forward to all your next steps. Emma, we have taken up a lot of your time. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks.
- [39:39]
Emma Parker
Thank you so much.
- [39:40]
Ibrahim Fauzi
And dear listeners, and dear listeners, thank you for listening to my conversation with Emma Parker. If you enjoyed this episode, you can find many more interviews like this on the New Books Network. Goodbye.
- [39:53]
Emma Parker
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooks network.com connect with us on Instagram and Bluesky with the handle eBooksNetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [40:34]
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