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Bart Moore-Gilbert (1952-2015)

Article  in  The Journal of Commonwealth Literature · March 2016

DOI: 10.1177/0021989416628263

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JCL0010.1177/0021989416628263The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureWalder

THE JOURNAL OF

C O M M O N W E A LT H
Obituary L I T E R A T U R E

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

Bart Moore-Gilbert 2016, Vol. 51(1) 182–185

© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0021989416628263
jcl.sagepub.com

Dennis Walder
Open University, UK

Bart Moore-Gilbert, the distinguished postcolonial author, critic and scholar, died on 2
December 2015, a few days before his 63rd birthday. Bart was an active member of the
Journal of Commonwealth Literature’s Editorial Board, and was Professor of Postcolonial
Studies and English at Goldsmiths College, London. He was also a leading figure in the
development of postcolonial studies beyond its founding moment in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, initially through his work on British writers of India, and subsequently
through his shrewd and challenging accounts of postcolonial theory and its implications.
My attention was first drawn to Bart’s work while I was editing the autobiography of
the novelist Philip Meadows Taylor — a figure not widely known beyond India, but one
of those earlier colonial administrators whose relations with local people were genuinely
close (he married a daughter of the Begum of Oudh) and progressive, at least until the
1857 Rebellion. Bart considered Taylor to be part of the necessary context in which to
judge later and better-known figures such as Kipling — indeed, his Oxford DPhil thesis
was on precisely this area.
Throughout his career, Bart questioned simplistic assumptions about the relationship
between colonizer and colonized, while demonstrating the need to resist the continuing
hold of the imperial narrative and its colonial subplots. His early work on Anglo-Indian
writers like Meadows Taylor was influenced by Edward Said’s groundbreaking
Orientalism (1978) which, however, he never accepted uncritically, arguing that the
forms of colonial discourse theory it generated often missed the subtle and contradictory
shifts apparent through close attention to literary and related texts as well as to the larger
movements of history and ideology.
In his first book, Kipling and “Orientalism” (1986/2014), Bart measured Kipling
against and discriminated him from prior Anglo-Indian authors who wrote about India.
The ways in which Kipling manipulated themes familiar within that tradition were
closely examined — themes such as social and domestic instability, isolation and break-
down. Crucially, the book demonstrated the importance of scholarly, archival work as a

Corresponding author:
Dennis Walder, Open University, UK.
Email: d.j.walder@open.ac.uk

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Walder 183

basis upon which to develop a sound critique of colonial writing. In it, Bart drew on the
Kipling papers at the University of Sussex, as well as such key documents as the files of
the Civil and Military Gazette.
Of course, Said’s Orientalism drew on a wide range of sources for its examination of
the discourses that — it was claimed — mediated the West’s dominant and dominating
relationship with the East. However, as Bart’s book clarified, problems inherent in Said’s
belief in the unvarying nature of “Orientalism” emerge as soon as you bring the case of
India to bear. Islam, for example, occupied a more complex role in Britain’s management
of India than in Said’s account of the West’s relationship with the Middle East.
Bart’s interest in postcolonial writing was first prompted by his experience teaching
in a Kenyan “bush school” for a year after graduating in English from Durham University.
The O-level syllabus he taught there included African literature — books more about
community, justice and history than anything he was familiar with from his A-levels in
England, he said. After a spell at the Roehampton Institute (as it was then), and appoint-
ment as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths College in 1989, he was finally in a position to teach
postcolonial literature.
As many of us from former Anglophone colonial territories have found, to pursue
such interests meant battling to revise the curriculum. Bart had already revealed an
increasingly political and polemical edge to his thinking through articles and essays on
British imperialism, the contemporary arts and, again, India. At Goldsmiths he instigated
a new MA course on “Postcolonial Fiction: Theory and Practice”, which proved an out-
standing success. A popular teacher, Bart later credited the enthusiasm of his Goldsmiths
students for his decision to write a critical survey of the whole burgeoning area of post-
colonial studies. It was to be the book for which he would become best known.
Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997) was a groundbreaking
attempt to address the reshaping of English studies and related modes of cultural analysis
produced by the growth of postcolonial studies. In particular, it identified an increasingly
heated separation between postcolonial theory on the one hand, and “the wider field of
postcolonial criticism” on the other (Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 1−2). Those of us toiling in
the field were all too conscious of the different directions in which critical thought was
proceeding, as well as of the earlier critiques of writers and theorists such as CLR James,
Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Wilson Harris, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
The achievement of Postcolonial Theory was to provide a shrewd and subtle analysis of
the processes by which these figures were being overtaken by what Robert Young ironi-
cally labelled the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial studies — Said, Gayatri Spivak and
Homi Bhabha.
Fair to a fault towards the varying and often wayward currents of debate during the
1990s, and the “potential [for] ideological irresponsibility” (Dennis Porter, quoted in
Moore-Gilbert, 1997: 55) of so many privileged postcolonialists then emerging within
the groves of academe, Postcolonial Theory established Bart’s reputation at home and
abroad. Numerous invitations to speak at conferences and to lecture followed — all of
which he took on with typical energy and aplomb, while continuing to question the
nature of solidarity in the general struggle to decolonize the mind. He went on to co-edit
a reader in Postcolonial Criticism (Moore-Gilbert et al., 1997), in which the distinction
between “criticism” and “theory” was not one he wished to push too hard, believing that

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184 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 51(1)

what mattered was to show how writing was influenced by, and could resist, the long
impact of colonialism.
Reflecting a long-term interest in the cultural traditions available for those of us
seeking new or at least revised models of personal and national identity, Bart wrote a
succinct study of Hanif Kureishi (2001), in which he explored the challenges for a
British Asian of Pakistani origin attempting to create a viable sense of self. Questions of
Englishness and “hybridity” now surfaced that were to prove of increasing importance
for a man who was himself a migrant from a former colony, and the growing complex
of feelings attached to his own past, and in particular towards the father he lost while in
his teens, led him to turn towards writing with a more personal and consciously self-
reflexive dimension. He characteristically cleared the intellectual ground first by con-
sidering the analogues and parallels between postcolonial and “Western” writings in a
wide-ranging and original account of Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and
Self-Representation (2009).
Broad in scope yet detailed in analysis, and notable for its inclusion of feminist life
writing by, for example, Assia Djebar, Sally Morgan and Sara Suleri, Postcolonial Life-
Writing argued for a discriminating awareness of the multiple traditions of “auto/bio-
graphical” writing from Augustine to the present. While postcolonial studies began to
fade as an area of predominant interest, life narratives had become a more potent sce-
nario for “speaking truth to power” (Said’s famous phrase provided the book’s epigraph).
And the question Bart now pursued was: what power had his father wielded before he
knew him as his young son in colonial East Africa?
The result was Bart’s last book, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family
Secrets (2014), which deftly interspersed memories of his happily outdoor life with his
African minder and his father with his travels to India to pursue archives and eyewit-
nesses, as he tried to discover the truth about his father’s role as an officer in the Indian
Police during the troubled 1940s. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley
Prize for memoir and biography. At the time of the award ceremony, Bart was already
quite ill but determined to attend. Before the prize-giving, he spoke of a recent grant to
pursue his growing research interest in the situation of Palestinians under the domination
of Israel. He intended to write a full study, while also preparing a novel. Alas, it was not
to be. Days after the birth of his second child (a son) with his wife, the academic Anna
Hartnell, he passed away, deeply mourned by his family and a very large circle of friends.

Selected Bibliography
Books
Moore-Gilbert B (1986/2014) Kipling and “Orientalism”. London: Routledge.
Moore-Gilbert B (ed.) (1994) The Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure. London: Routledge.
Moore-Gilbert B (1997) Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso.
Moore-Gilbert B (2001) Hanif Kureishi. Manchester University Press.
Moore-Gilbert B (2009) Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics and Self-Representation.
Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Moore-Gilbert B (2014) The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets. London: Verso.
Moore-Gilbert B, Stanton G and Maley W (eds) (1997) Postcolonial Criticism (Longman Critical
Readers). Abingdon: Routledge.

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Walder 185

Book chapters
Moore-Gilbert B (2011) Kipling and postcolonial literature. In: Booth H (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.155–168.
Moore-Gilbert B (2012) From “the politics of recognition” to “the policing of recognition”:
Writing Islam in Hanif Kureishi and Mohsin Hamid. In: Ahmed R, Morey P and Yaqin A
(eds) Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (38). New York: Routledge,
pp.183–199.

Articles
Moore-Gilbert B (2002) I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim: Kipling and Postcolonialism. Journal
of Commonwealth Literature 37(2): 39–58.
Moore-Gilbert B (2003) Olive Schreiner’s story of an African farm: Reconciling feminism and
anti-imperialism? Women: A Cultural Review 14(1): 85–103.
Moore-Gilbert B (2005) New worlds, new selves: Montaigne, “the Atlantic” and the emergence of
modern autobiography. Atlantic Studies 2(1): 1–14.
Moore-Gilbert B (2014) Time bandits: Temporality and the politics of form in Palestinian wom-
en’s life-writing. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50(2): 189–201.

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