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The issue of en glish is an important area of inquiry in recent debates about postcolonial theory and globalization. The different critical accounts of En glish inscribe a historical

understanding of cultural transmission from Europe to the rest of the world under the aegis of empire. In these accounts, “En glish” denotes not only a national language and literature but also a literary canon and its institutionalization. An education in En glish, focalized by canonical texts and literary criticism, takes shape as a major node of cultural traffic from imperial center to colonial peripheries. Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan’s seminal work on nineteenth- century India, shows, for instance, how the En glish intended the study of En glish literature in India to inculcate in their colonized subjects a respect for and desire to emulate the culture of their rulers. In mobilizing the forces of cultural imperialism and hegemony, En-glish is one of the coordinates of what Terry Cochran has called “cos-mopolitical” modernity, a historical model in which “language and state are coextensive” and “globalization results from the progressive imposition of a local, state culture on the world” (68, 70).

But Cochran’s observation does not characterize all the schol-arly insights into the role En glish played in the former British empire. Far from demonstrating the totality of “imposition,” postcolonial studies of En glish recurrently disclose variegated modes of adapta-tion, appropriation, and other distancing strategies on the part of the colonized—in India and other parts of the world. To Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Indians were able to split En glish literature off from their rulers’ political intent and read it instead as “a repository of

elaine yee lin ho, associate professor

in the school of english, university of

hong Kong, has written the monographs

Timothy Mo (manchester up, 2001) and

Anita Desai (northcote, 2004) and ar-

ticles on world anglophone literature

and hong Kong literature and film. a

collection of essays she coedited, China

Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces (hong

Kong up), will appear early in 2009.

“Imagination’s Commonwealth”: Edmund Blunden’s Hong Kong Dialogue

elai�ne yee li�n ho

[ P M L A

76 [ © 2009 by the modern language associ�ati�on of ameri�ca ]

abstract and universal values freely available to the colonized as much as to the colonizer,” which they appealed to for justification of their anticolonial claims (12). Shu-mei Shih offers a comparable perspective, with differ-ent contextual explanations, on writers in early-twentieth- century, “semicolonial” China (375–76). Shih points out that some of the writers did not identify the use of En glish as colonialist practice or their own affinities with En glish as a sign of colonial subjugation and that they sometimes used En glish for modern and anticolonial purposes. In the early writing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Simon Gikandi sees “a drama of contradictions,” significant among which are anxieties about the culture of En-glish and Ngũgĩ’s own admission to the colo-nial university (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 9). Gikandi submits that this “more ambivalent portrait . . . seems to be closer to the historical record” of 1930s Kenya than to the Manichean opposi-tion between colonizer and colonized Ngũgĩ’s later work put in place (17).

These modalities of En glish argue that globalization is more productively studied as the intensifying effects of the outside, domi-nant, and other becoming localizable. They enable the reconceptualization of globaliza-tion as complicated local entanglements rather than the “progressive imposition” of a single state culture on the world. Thus, while Coch-ran may be right that the language question is “not at bottom a question about language at all [but] . . . conceal[s] an assumed model of globalization” (71), the postcolonial discourse on En glish problematizes any singular model of globalization in colonial modernity. As Gi-kandi astutely points out, in postcolonial stud-ies “the process of globalization” has come “to be narrated as simultaneously modern (rea-sonable, universal, totalized) and differenti-ated (driven by its own set of rationalities)” (“Globalization” 642; emphasis added).

My essay studies engagements on a little- known periphery—British colonial Hong Kong in the cold war 1950s. Focalized by En-

glish, the essay articulates a discourse of this periphery as the spatiotemporality of the cru-cial and deceptively transparent word simul-taneously, which Gikandi uses to observe that globalization is both “modern” and “differen-tiated.” This discourse of simultaneity can be elaborated in at least two ways. It is, first, a narrative of how the actions and responses of people on either side of the colonial divide relate to their experience of division. The pro-tagonists of this narrative, Edmund Blunden and his students, are the subjects in En glish constituted through writing, teaching, and learning literature and literary criticism. Their perceptions of global culture and their place in it are formed in the ambit of the late British Empire and the emerging juggernaut of the cold war. At the same time, their trans-actions with En glish enable them to rethink themselves as global actors.

Second, like Viswanathan’s study, this essay is concerned with “beginnings,” elabo-rated by Edward Said as structures of “affili-ation, that is, those creeds, philosophies, and visions re- assembling the world in new non- familial ways” (xix). As “an activity,” begin-ning is associated “with a field of play, habits of mind, conditions to be fulfilled” that are “set in time and society . . . as a fact of writing language” (19). The discourse of simultaneity in 1950s Hong Kong posits that this begin-ning is an aggregating of subjects and actions toward redefining the conditions of possibil-ity of their world. But the terms of this redefi-nition are fundamentally different from those of contemporary colonial subjects in India and elsewhere in the British Empire who were transforming themselves into nationalists. En glish as the medium of creative expression and a university subject generates the forces of aggregation that mobilize a provincial lo-cation while agency takes shape as a cultural venture. Positing themselves as locus of a new world, the subjects of aggregation are engaged in a collective project—and projection—of cultural globality, the contours of which are

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contradistinct from the dominant nationalis-tic and globalizing forces of their time.

In these subjects’ affiliations with En glish, what may look like consent in a recalcitrant colonial hegemony needs to be elaborated against the geopolitics of the region—in par-ticular, the civil war for possession of the Chinese nation. For the many emigrés, exiles, and refugees displaced onto Hong Kong, the nation, rather than the colonial regime, is the site of violence.1 If not exactly a haven, colo-nial Hong Kong is the point of release from the nation and is where, as melancholic desire, the nation can be endured. This unique colo-nial temporality is further confirmed in its place by the exigencies of the Asian cold war as Hong Kong survived and began to flourish as the only free-trade port on the entire China coast—because it was British, not Chinese. In the structure of the peripheral as the time and space of simultaneity, the paradox of affiliat-ing with and through En glish at the global moment of decolonization articulates the cul-tural logic of a specific history and society.

The point of entry into this cultural logic is a new reading of Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) as cross- cultural literary subject and emblem of a dialectic between local and global, provincial and cosmopolitan. A poet, essayist, and academic, Blunden taught for ten years in Hong Kong near the end of his career. Framing the cross- cultural hermeneutic of his poetry and professional activities, his pro-posal of an “imagination’s commonwealth” differs considerably from the modernist and anglocentric poetics of more notable con-temporaries like T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis. Imagination’s commonwealth conceives of anglophone literature as a world discourse made possible by the peripheral voices that engage with metropolitan poetry. As this dis-course emerges in Hong Kong, it assumes the form of a dialogue between Blunden and his students, who respond to and contest, con-sciously and unconsciously, their teacher as master world maker.

[ i�i� ]In the 1950s, En glish at Hong Kong Univer-sity “progressed” beyond the language of instruction to become firmly entrenched in an academic department that taught a cur-riculum of canonical texts to Hong Kong students, mainly of Chinese and other ethnic provenance.2 Confirming En glish as an aca-demic specialization, the university offered its chair professorship in En glish in 1953 to Ed-mund Blunden, who was a name recognized in En gland as poet, critic, and reviewer and who had taught at Oxford University and, unusually for his time, in Japan. While still an undergraduate at Oxford, Blunden had already published several volumes of poetry. His university education was interrupted by service in World War I, during which he fought and was gassed at Passchendaele. This traumatic experience confirmed Blunden in his lifelong opposition to war and to the Eu-ropean nations’ expansionist ambitions that were unleashed in global terror. Demobilized, he published a volume of poems about his wartime experience before teaching at Tokyo Imperial University from 1924–27. Returning to En gland, he published Undertones of War (1928), his memoir of frontline combat, which became a critical and commercial success.

By the time Blunden arrived in Hong Kong, however, his earlier reputation as a poet was al-ready much diminished. A bare four years after Undertones of War, his poetry was judged out-moded by a modernist temper in literary Lon-don. The aura of a writer belated, out of time, would shadow Blunden all his life, from the 1930s and 1940s, when he published many vol-umes of poetry and criticism and was a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. The Hong Kong appointment captured his exile from literary London in its most perceptible form. Blunden’s biographer, Barry Webb, makes this point in the only ex-tended account that has so far been written of Blunden’s life in Hong Kong. Webb sees the

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Hong Kong sojourn as “a gradual withdrawal from both creative and academic life . . . punc-tuated by bursts of frustrated anger” at the uni-versity’s administrative politics (294). Haunted by “the trenches of the Somme and Passchen-daele, which he revisited almost nightly in dreams from which he awoke shrieking and shaking,” Blunden succumbed to depression and dipsomania and, nearing the end of his tenure, described himself as “‘a disappointed man’ who had committed academic suicide by accepting the Hong Kong chair” (303, 306).

In Hong Kong, Blunden wrote a number of poems on the colony, most of which are collected in A Hong Kong House (1962). His prolific prose output continued in the form of essays and reviews for En glish, Hong Kong, and Asian regional publications; frequent correspondence with family and friends; and speeches and visiting lectures (Kirkpatrick). This copious Hong Kong writing has received scant attention. In post- 1997 studies of Hong Kong anglophone writing, Blunden has been invoked and dismissed as the leading example of expatriate writing long superseded by “lo-cal” voices and by poetic spaces “occupied by real Heung Gong Yan (Hong Kong people)” (Ingham 9). While the politics of authenticity evident in the dismissal is unsurprising for a recently decolonized location, its resonance with earlier criticism of Blunden—by none other than F. R. Leavis—is ironic. A study of Blunden’s critical reception during and after his lifetime can be very revealing about the ide-ologies of the local and the global that continue to be discomfited by his writing and career.

Blunden’s aspirations to write poems as a transnational discourse, the rhetoric of the poems’ articulation, and their engagement with the places in Japan and Hong Kong where they take shape all differ from the literary- cultural politics of the critics who found him wanting. To Leavis, writing in 1932 about the “contemporary situation” of En glish poetry, Blunden’s mix of “rich rustic-ity,” “ home- spun texture,” and “frank literary

quality” distinguished his poems from those of the pedestrian Georgians (53). But it hardly justified a claim to serious national regard when compared to the style of the modern-ist luminaries of his time, especially of Eliot, to whom Leavis accorded preeminent place.3 Paul Fussell gives Blunden’s “En glishness” and his place in modernity a more sympa-thetic reading in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Fussell draws attention to how arcadian constructs in Blunden’s poetry are refracted through the survivor’s damaged lens. He commends the way Blunden ironi-cally deploys “traditional En glish literary pastoral” (255) to critique how “rural life . . . is forever tainted” by an awareness of “the enemy” (258).4 In emphasizing this irony, formed in the crucible of war, Fussell hopes to rescue Blunden for modernity.

Leavis’s judgment on Blunden is one among the many he pronounced on writers who failed his test for a place in an En glish literary tradition. While Blunden’s place in modernity is an interesting subject in itself,5 the real measure of his distance from Leavis is his different views regarding En glish, es-pecially as it travels beyond Leavis’s national compass. Francis Mulhern’s thoroughgoing critique of Leavis’s dictation on the meaning of “En glishness” has laid bare its “provincial-ism” and “normalizing imperative,” which attack and exclude all that it considers for-eign to its self- identity (261–62). In the con-text of empire, Gikandi has made the crucial connection among Leavis’s insular cultural paradigm, its universalization through En-glish literature, and its global dissemination through the discipline of En glish in colo-nial universities in the years between the two world wars. Besides suppressing all that it considers foreign, the logic of Leavis’s En-glishness transpires as a lack of interest in the culturally different. Paradoxically, as Gikandi observes, this obliviousness to cultural differ-ence allows Leavis to make claims for En glish literature’s “universality.” (“Globalization”

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651). In Leavis’s discourse on the university, he connects En glish literature, “through the institution of criticism, to the idea of a national community; but it is also through criticism, the act of making interpretative and moral judgments, that the mission of En-glish became universal” (651–52). Gikandi further traces the quasi- organic extension from Leavis’s national community of En glish globally to “the new universities established in the colonies after 1945 . . . dominated by Leavisites in ‘exile’ from Oxbridge” (658).

Blunden, no less than Leavis, embodies the transition in metropolitan literary cul-ture during the interwar years. But Leavis’s determined efforts to capture and define En-glishness in a historical moment marked by anxiety about the loss of empire could not be more alien to Blunden’s work as poet, critic, and teacher. This difference is brought into sharp relief by their views on En glish litera-ture outside En gland and particularly on the role En glish should play in foreign universi-ties. Though an “exile” from Oxbridge first in Japan and later in Hong Kong, Blunden was no Leavisite. From the start of his teach-ing career at Tokyo Imperial University, Blunden adopted an approach to En glish lit-erature and literary studies as transnational discourse that hinged on an acute perception of cultural and locational differences. In an essay, “En glish Literature in Japan,” written to introduce a critical study of Keats by his university colleague Takeshi Saito, Blunden draws attention to the determination Japa-nese scholars of En glish show struggling for access to books and information in the ab-sence of facilities the metropolitan scholar can take for granted.6 This struggle “must be experienced in order to be comprehended”: Blunden translates distance from the center into everyday lived experience and inserts it into circulation as a sign of the globalizing cultural semiotics of En glish (10). Arguably, Blunden’s own expatriation in Tokyo sensi-tized him to the Japanese scholar’s privation

and prompted him to argue for the worth of marginality. While a center- periphery model of thinking may be at work here, it does not necessarily follow that Blunden assumes that the center is the origin or arbiter of value. The essay describes at length the “qualities of spirit,” a kind of emotional capital, that enable Japanese scholars to overcome their burden of marginality. Generalizing from the example of Saito’s passion for Keats, Blunden confirms place as the point of departure toward the geographically unbounded, toward a space of “inward companionship” in excess of any single national culture, a personalized bond of affection between the Japanese scholar and the En glish writer being studied (10).

From a related vantage on the transnation-ality of “En glish Literature in Japan,” Blunden shows Japanese scholars not only as travelers in the abstract but as pilgrims to the metrop-olis. These cosmopolitan Japanese scholars show up by contrast the provincial inertia of their hosts, “nodding at the Oval or yawning over a race- card” (11). Members of the En glish literary class are the self- referential target of Blunden’s essay; complacent on their home-ground, they are unreceptive to the Japanese visitors who look increasingly like alienated modernist subjects. The visitors’ experience is not unlike the dislocation of colonized subjects in the imperial center that the Indo- Trinidadian British writer Sam Selvon and the Malaysian novelist Lee Kok Liang memorably narrated.7 In the world history of En glish, Blunden’s complaint anticipates postimperial subjects’ critiques of their metropolitan habi-tats. Returning to the Japanese scholar in situ, Blunden accentuates how the work of cultural crossing has been a largely Japanese initiative. He names two professors whose hospitality contrasts sharply with the lassitude of the En-glish as hosts and whose collection of books would make the En glish scholar/ visitor in Ja-pan feel at home (17). The constant inspiration of the literary transnational is a humanistic conception of friendship inspired by a com-

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mon scholarly passion and by that passion’s iconic scene, the homeliness of the library and the pleasure of conversation.

“Imagination’s commonwealth” captures the many dimensions of Blunden’s institu-tional experience. As a term organizing the literary transnational, it articulates commu-nion between individual scholar and writer, scholarly collegiality and friendship, and a globalizable network of empathy. Far from be-ing an imposition or quasi- organic extension from center to periphery, En glish is dislodged from its preeminent place and reconstituted as the scholarly medium of a cross- cultural habitation. “Imagination’s commonwealth” comes from “The Author’s Last Words to His Students,” a 1928 poem Blunden wrote for his students before leaving Tokyo. The poem de-scribes the process by which formal teacher- student relations are transformed into the ground of a transnational social imaginary. As a farewell poem, it is elegiac, but if there is loss, it is entirely held to Blunden’s account, in his repeated moves to divest himself of authority as teacher and, by implication, as En glish expert. He asks his students’ forgive-ness for the wrong he has done them; he had wanted to share with them “the glories” of En-glish literature he “most revered,” but he fears he has only led them into “colourless confu-sion,” “chilled” their “bright passion,” and of-fended their “finer senses.” In the last stanza, these self- impugning maneuvers gather in a tribute to the students’ commitment and their initiative in community formation:

And I will ever pray for your souls’ health, Remembering how, deep- tasked yet eager- eyed, You loved imagination’s commonwealth, Following with smiling wonder a frail guide Who bears beyond the ocean The voice of your devotion.

The students follow the teacher and are his guide; the teacher shows and is shown the way. In the enthusiasm Blunden shares

with his students for literature that resolves into a common good, he internalizes their “devotion,” and they give him, their “frail guide,” a sense of mission. But incorporating his students’ devotion also burdens Blunden. “[B]ears” suggests carrying forth; the privi-lege of belonging obliges him, from here on, to make the students’ “devotion” to litera-ture and to the literary communion between teacher and students known beyond their own shores. In this community formation and the action it sanctions, imagination as-sumes the role of what Arjun Appadurai has called “social practice”: “[n]o longer mere fan-tasy . . . no longer simple escape . . . no longer elite pastime . . . and no longer mere contem-plation,” it has become “an organized field of social practices, a form of work . . . and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility” (31). As the dynamic of literary writing and appreciation, imagination devel-ops a collectivizing momentum beyond indi-vidual and national boundaries. It is socially and culturally transformative, for it has the capacity to mobilize individual empathy and bring a “commonwealth” into existence. As a cluster of ideas about the literary transna-tional, imagination’s commonwealth departs from Leavis’s disciplinary regime of “En glish” and Pascale Casanova’s recent and minatory “world republic of letters,” a republic “of ri-valry, struggle, and inequality” (4).

[ i�i�i� ]Moving between private and public, between the society of scholar/ friends and the soci-ality of literary devotees, Blunden opens up the space for his work as poet and teacher and for his self- identity as En glish and cos-mopolitan. The literary transnationalism he began promoting in Japan is palpable both in the poems he wrote in Hong Kong and in his professional activities there as scholar and teacher, but it is molded by the different,

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Chinese, cultural and geopolitical situation of colonial Hong Kong. In each Hong Kong poem, imagination’s commonwealth devolves into singularized moments of cross- cultural identification. Each poem attests to the con-tingent nature of empathy; each can be read as an improvisation of empathy. The Hong Kong poems bear witness to a preoccupation with the ethics of cross- cultural encounter and representation that challenges any mo-nologic reading of them as colonial.

As chair professor in En glish at the only university in the British Colony of Hong Kong, the social and symbolic capital he enjoyed was partially offset by the fact that, as an intellec-tual and academic, he occupied “a dominated position in the field of power” ruled by gov-ernment officials and businesspeople (Bour-dieu 144). The poem “View from a Hong Kong Office” inscribes the transaction between colonial- establishment pressures and marginal sympathies and what it indicates about the per-meability of political and ideological divides in 1950s Hong Kong. The poem was first published in Hong Kong Business Symposium (1957), a col-lection of short pieces on the colonial economy, whose authors read like a roll call of the (often inseparable, then as now) political and business elite. As one of five honorific items introducing the collection, the poem is clearly marginal and co- opted into the colonial- capitalist establish-ment. The poem depicts the Hong Kong harbor, and it uses the trope of the family to organize the vessels in the harbor into hierarchical and affective kinship relations. As part of this naturalizing strategy, the persona speaks with childlike delight of the vessels, comparing them to “ponderous uncles or rich round aunts” on whom “intelligent nimble nephews wait. . . .” In celebrating the traditional family regime in good working order, the trope can be aligned with justifications, in Britain and locally, for Hong Kong’s remaining a Crown colony in an era of decolonization.

From a different geopolitical vantage, the poem’s world- mindedness reaches in many

directions, beyond the declining British Em-pire. Its publication in 1957 is framed by the arrival in Hong Kong of large numbers of refugees from communist mainland China and by the tensions of the Asian cold war. The poem views Hong Kong’s bifocal topography not only as a colonialist and capitalist posses-sion but also as a commonwealth enclave. In transmuting the free-trade values of mobil-ity, variety, and open borders into kinship and social bonds, the family trope strategi-cally reconstitutes these values as an affective order of the local, as natural to Hong Kong as the harbor itself: “But still it is liberty- hall; and look at those / Other water- children, how each comes and goes / . . . in the confident way that says ‘This is my home’” (5). Beyond local-ity, Blunden imagines the harbor—and Hong Kong, by extension—as a hospitable, natural, and free space where traffic flows among the family of nations:

Thus gently all these from the greatest to least Like a free lively family merrily all Are arriving and off again, West or East, In the blue- china hall.

This view points to Hong Kong as a sanctuary from the political turmoil in mainland China, almost idyllic in its openness on a geopoliti-cal frontline of the cold war. In the poem’s retrieval of kinship affinities and sanctions of free movement and association, it implements an ethical turn away from the terrors of the nation and a militarized world order.

“View from a Hong Kong Office” is Blunden’s most panoramic and, in the context of its first venue of publication, his most pub-lic view of Hong Kong. Later retitled “View from the University of Hong Kong,” the poem opened A Hong Kong House, published in 1962. While the content hardly changed, the different title and publication in Blunden’s own collection sought to adjust the poem’s view as autonomous of business interests. As the opening poem, it performs a function

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similar to the Japanese essay’s, introducing a peripheral location and its subjects to the world. The concept of cross- cultural encoun-ter as a process of bringing into view—and into the realm of knowability—what was pre-viously unknown defines Blunden’s interest in the “East” and is manifested in his Hong Kong poems. But this concept implicates him in at least two dubious maneuvers, as the po-ems also show: the valorization of the other in order to confirm the self as the knowing arbi-ter of cultural value and the subsequent over-turning of the self ’s position as dominated in the dominant. The self can evade but not ulti-mately escape entrapment in a binary relation with the other, even as it seeks new and more equitable subject- to- subject connections.

An otherness that moves in and out of the representative gaze reveals but also unsettles the persistent self- referentiality in the Hong Kong poems. “Chinese Paperknife,” one of the Hong Kong poems, illustrates the dilemma of whether—and if so how—the culturally dif-ferent can escape representation as object and other. The poem describes an encounter be-tween the first- person speaker and the epon-ymous artifact, which he has long possessed but only now admits to seeing, for “the first time ever.” The mutually implicated issues of seeing and knowing unfold in the poem as it moves through the acts of recognizing, visu-alizing, and representing minute details of the carving on the knife. As the speaker observes the object, it comes alive; the “tiny carved bird” on the knife takes shape as an owl; the owl emerges from “foliage strange” that is revealed for the first time in all its intricate “uptwisting”; and the whole animated min-iature—a “trifle”—becomes the summation of an unknown fellow artist’s “forest dream.” As the poem relates the ontogenesis of an in-digenous artifact previously unobserved and of an observation well enjoyed, it simultane-ously represents the speaker’s autogenesis—that is, the resurgence of his imagination and its empathetic reaching across to a culturally

different artist as comrade. Yet these move-ments do not point to or generate a desire to penetrate the truth of the paper knife’s ori-gins, essence, or continued existence as art. The last stanza reads:

Then praiséd be this to- day whose light Revealed this fabulous tree And original owl, which many a night Will lead into mystery. (11)

At the moment of closure but also disrupting it, the speaker awakens to desire—the plea-surable anticipation that this first meeting might well lead to “many a night” of enjoy-able encounters. Seeing and re- presentation open a tantalizing future up “into mystery,” not a positivist connection between phenom-enon and an aesthetics of first causes. Indeed, the stability of the paper knife as object is in doubt, for its representability can hardly be guaranteed if further encounters are “mys-tery.” It has become in fact a magical object, a talisman like the Vergilian golden bough that gives access to the unknown other world.

Like “View from the University of Hong Kong,” “Chinese Paperknife” subjects what is “Eastern” to “Western” eyes. In looking again or, rather, for the first time—it is hard to say which—at the knife, the persona registers the presence of craft and labor and makes con-tact across cultures with a fellow artist. In the speaker’s view of the paper knife, as in the other poem’s view of the harbor, one can de-tect a movement of idealism that, in the words of Rey Chow, “envision[s] and assert[s] good-ness and perfection in the thing or person perceived” and that can involve the tendency “to relate to alterity through mythification; to imagine ‘the other,’ no matter how prosaic or impoverished, as essentially different, good, kind, enveloped in a halo, and beyond the contradictions that constitute our own his-torical place” (41, xx). Blunden’s acts of visu-alization and representation are paradoxical because they delight in realizing the form of

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the unknown other and because they construe the other as idyllic and mysterious and hence as eluding the regime of the representable.

The problem becomes acute in poems that focus on relations with others whose cultural and class differences cannot be ame-liorated by institutional, artistic, or linguis-tic commonalities. The poem “The Sleeping Amah” is, according to Webb, about a Chi-nese woman named Ah Ling, Blunden’s do-mestic helper; the class, ethnic, gender, and language divides that complicate relations be-tween colonizer and colonized would appear to overdetermine reading (294):

“The East has all the time, the West has none”; But I know not what I say. Others must come this way To tease the riddle out, if it be one, Better or not—yet who Will find me what I thought I knew?

There she still sits, unknown to me else, in her chair After the long day’s labour, sitting there Tired out, her sewing not yet done, A child, a mother, the wise face now begun. Like me she falls asleep Quietly moored upon the warm time- deep. (9)

Ironically, the poem seems to anticipate an orientalist critique and tries from the first line to preempt it. Placing this line in quota-tion marks, the speaker rejects the platitude about extreme difference between “East” and “West” and with it the position of knowledge the accident of history has assigned him. There is, indeed, the desire to know—other-wise the poem would not have been written—but this is restrained by uncertainty about the continuing validity of prior knowledge and by doubt about the possibility of new discov-ery: “yet who / Will find me what I thought I knew?” In acknowledging that his cognitive home has turned into the dubious abode of “what I thought I knew,” the speaker implic-itly accedes to the amah’s alterity as someone

on the other side of the colonial divide. All he can know about the amah is what he can describe. In stanza 2, the speaker does not try to project depth from the surface textures he registers or to construe essence from phe-nomenon. There is no presumption of knowl-edge, no knowingness that might transform him into an insider; the amah’s interiority remains inviolate. Nor is there an attempt to construct an identity between observer and observed; only in sleep are they alike. Perhaps they will meet in a dream, but not in the here and now. As the poem closes, a note of quiet contentment resonates. Through a rhetori-cal sleight of hand that reinstates the homely scene at the end, the poem is able to trans-form cultural separation between the speaker and the amah into quasi- domestic affiliation and draws back from the void of cultures as incommensurate. Against the historical a priori—that is, the symmetrical opposition between “all- time” and “no- time”—the poem conjures the pleasure of companionship in the spacious plenitude of “time- deep.”

Yet if the ethical alternative to a colonialist- historicist othering is an idealizing respect for native alterity as unknowable—or mysteri-ous—then “The Sleeping Amah” and “Chinese Paperknife” both show not only the reach but also the limits of cross- cultural empathy. Ah Ling will always be silent, unknown, ineffable. Without the other as culturally different sub-ject, empathy is diverted from its work toward the new social imaginary that is imagination’s commonwealth and thus from intervening in history. Blunden’s Hong Kong dialogue seems to have arrived at its limits. To trace the voices of the other, we need to turn from the poems to Blunden’s other cultural- sector activities; the resulting historicist optic will enable his interlocutors across the colonial and cultural divide to emerge.

Blunden’s friendship with left- wing Chi-nese intellectuals in Hong Kong complicates the privileged but straitened world of his colonial expatriation. In cultivating their

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friendship, he seeks to extend the purview of imagination’s commonwealth; in their re-sponse, this commonwealth develops reso-nance and density as a world consciousness. Earlier on, in the late 1930s, Blunden’s strong opposition to war had led to an initial reluc-tance to criticize Germany, and for this he was accused of being a fascist sympathizer. Shortly after his arrival in Hong Kong in 1955, he vis-ited the People’s Republic of China, where he was met by Prime Minister Zhou Enlai; this visit led to the suspicion, openly voiced in the colony, that he harbored communist sympathies.8 Blunden’s surprising left- wing affiliations in Hong Kong cannot be under-stood unless his lifelong opposition to war is reframed by cold war tensions in Asia and the cultural internationalist horizon of intellectu-als and writers from the so- called nonaligned nations. His affinities with left- wing scholars and writers can be seen as an attempt to lever-age his position of colonial privilege toward support of political subjects regarded with much greater suspicion than he was by the co-lonial ruling class. These left-wing sympathies may also be a deliberate challenge to those in the establishment who, in criticizing his China visit, had sought to impose their mastery on colonial cultural politics. More significantly, Blunden’s engagement with intellectuals whose colonial position is the polar oppposite of his own discloses a fluidity in Hong Kong cultural politics that belies a historicist divi-sion of East and West predicated on rigid cold war or colonial and socialist ideological op-positions and on the physical border between mainland China and Hong Kong.9

The most visible expression of Blunden’s affinities with socialist intellectuals and writ-ers was his writing for the magazine Eastern Horizon, as well as his friendship with its founding editor, Liu Pengju. Liu, a graduate of the foreign languages faculty of Sichuan University, went to Britain for postgraduate literary studies at Leeds University. Return-ing to Hong Kong in 1950, Liu worked for

the communist newpapers Ta Kung Pao and Xinwanbao (New Evening Post) before leav-ing the latter in 1959 to organize the publi-cation of Eastern Horizon. The magazine’s stable of contributors included Rewi Alley, Han Suyin, Mulk Raj Anand, and other lo-cal and overseas writers who supported in-ternational socialism. It gravitated politically toward mainland China—given Liu’s profes-sional background, the magazine likely had mainland Chinese funding.10 The first issue of Eastern Horizon appeared in July 1960, five years after the Bandung conference and as the material expression of its cultural legacy.11 “Asia is awake. Africa is on the move,” Liu declares in the inaugural editorial, “People in many lands are opening their eyes to these changes. . . . It is important for us as people to find a way to remain as we are, yet to un-derstand others” (“Eastern Diary” [1960]). The journal had an explicitly pan- Asian and internationalist agenda, positioning itself as a forum “for an independent exchange of views and so contribut[ing] to a better appreciation of the fast developing East with its divers cul-tures and peoples” (2). Eastern Horizon was published in En glish, and the language is seen not as an instrument of cultural imperialism but as the medium of some of “the best writ-ing on Asia” by both “Eastern and Western writers and scholars,” which would have pop-ular appeal but might also interest the expert reader. The rather naive promotional rheto-ric belies the magazine’s ambition to herald a new world order premised on a reinvigo-rated social imaginary that finds its value in the pursuit of the common good, an order in which writing and reading are communica-tive and community practices.12

In the first year, Blunden contributed poems, book reviews, and a piece on a Chi-nese operatic performance. He also wrote an article called “China in En glish Literature” (1960), which harks back to his earlier com-plaint about En glish uninterest in Japanese scholars. Criticizing the double marginality

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of China in En glish literary discourse—that it is rarely written about and only by little- known writers—the article reads like an in-cipient work of colonial discourse analysis. In one of his last editorials, shortly before his death in 1962,13 Liu quotes from a poem Blunden gave him, in which an old En glish villager describes a cricket green whose dents from World War II bombs make it impossible to bowl effectively (“Eastern Diary” [1962]). The editorial ends, “The title [of the poem] is ‘H- Bomb.’ I like this poem. I like Edmund.” The En glishness of Blunden’s poetic compul-sions—the mutual displacement of pastoral idyll and war and his love of cricket—crosses cultural divides to provoke this affective re-sponse from Liu. The exchange between them, mediated by poetry, is, in turn, a small act in the magazine’s internationalist imaginary: “it is important for us as people to find a way to remain as we are, yet to understand others” (“Eastern Diary” [1960]).

[ i�v� ]Blunden’s dialogue with the Eastern Horizon collective belongs to the emerging colloquy of voices that give imagination’s commonwealth material form amid the ideological combat of the Asian cold war. His students’ imaginative responses complicate the dialogue both lo-cally and globally. Blunden’s lifelong preoc-cupation with war, poetry, and “En glishness” is transmitted to his Hong Kong students and transmuted by them in work that generates an ironic outcome he could not have antici-pated. Some of his students’ writing inscribes translational moments when acts of colonial imitation deliver a worldliness beyond their originary compass. The literary dialogue Blunden instigates is folded into a polypho-nous interlocution and unfurls as En glish literature makes a global turn toward anglo-phone literature.

In 1961, to honor their professor’s sixty- fifth birthday, Blunden’s students at Hong

Kong University edited a collection of more than eighty tributes ranging from poems to prose, letters to short memoirs. The alpha-betical arrangement of the pieces intermixes unknown Hong Kong student writers, their teachers, Blunden’s family and friends, poli-ticians, royalty, established writers like John Betjeman, Graham Greene, Cecil Day-Lewis, John Masefield, Siegfried Sassoon, Stephen Spender, and scholars like D. J. Enright, Paul Engle, and Earl Miner. In the dedication, the editors declare, “Edmund Blunden came to the University of Hong Kong in 1953, and since then he has been leading students into the golden world of En glish Literature. On the occasion of his Sixty- Fifth Birthday, let us join in singing so that ‘the world may to us answer and the echoes ring’” (Chau, Lo, and Yung 10). The students have been led, as they admit, into the “golden world of En glish Literature,” and now one may see in their declaration and their Festschrift project what Gayatri Spivak calls a cultural “worlding” (262)—the incor-poration, through Blunden as colonial agent, of a “native” project into imperial cultural governance. While this may be the case, the Festschrift provides recurrent evidence that the students’ association with Blunden was a way into the world or, rather, possible worlds. On the everyday level, “his conversation,” one undergraduate remembered, “can lead you from the remotest part of the world to the lat-est current news” (Djao). For another student, an enthusiast of Western opera about to visit Italy for the first time, Blunden, unsolicited, wrote letters of introduction to his friends in Rome (Lo). Collectively, the students levered their association with Blunden and En glish literature in their world making and showed that the world they created in the publishing event exceeded the boundaries established by the British Empire. The cosmopolitan ensem-ble they brought together and in which they projected themselves as world subjects blurs the boundaries between “periphery” and the rest of the world. Through the students’ effort,

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imagination’s commonwealth, as a modality of subject and collective formation, acquires material form in a print publication; its histor-ical time conjoins Blunden’s birthday with the students’ originary moment as world citizens.

What emerges, however, is not a seamless generational transition like the one Blunden celebrated in his harbor poem but a more stri-ated genealogy. Two of the student contribu-tions in particular, Yeung Ngai Hin’s lyrical essay “Something Aeolian” and Anne Choy’s poem “Yalding,” develop complicated inter-textual references to war and other sites of Blunden’s poetic absorption and to his author-ity as “En glish” professor. Speaking of their teacher with sympathy and deference, Yeung’s and Choy’s voices reverberate with darker un-dertones. As they remember Blunden as poet and mentor, they also locate their distance from him and from each other. A postcolo-nial sensibility emerges in their intimations of difference from such a strong precursor.

The sensibility assumes two forms—imitation and mimicry, or the consonantal and dissonantal—that work in tandem to re-locate Blunden according to the students’ de-sire. In their common struggle for autonomy, Yeung and Choy differ from each other in the way they configure imitation and mim-icry. Yeung’s “Something Aeolion” narrates a walk among the ruins of a World War II battle site in Hong Kong known as the Gin- Drinkers Line. Yeung—like his companion, Harnam S. Grewal—is a self- styled “Blun-den ian,” and he alludes to his tutelage at the beginning of the essay:

Transcending time and space . . . Blunden’s war poetry . . . stirs and echoes across my mind whenever my thought is awakened on the gloomy prospects of War. . . . On this memo-rable occasion, my friend and I, sitting at the feet of Edmund Blunden as students of En glish literature, felt a close and irresistible alliance in spirit with Blunden, the subaltern soldier- poet of the Flanders war of 1914. . . . (184)

While this opening admits an “alliance” or con-sonance with Blunden, it also signals two disso-nant movements that flow through the essay: the transmutation of Blunden’s body into ineffable “spirit” and the maneuver out of the European– Great War– English matrix into a new location of anglophone creative expression.

As Yeung scrambles over the ruins of the Hong Kong site, he observes, “I felt an eerie chill in spite of the warm sun overhead. . . . The ‘murmurous haunt’ of Blunden’s lines re-verberated in my ears. . . .” He then quotes two lines from Blunden. Venturing into “dark lab-yrinthine tunnels,” Yeung notices how the at-mosphere was “hauntingly reminiscent of the poet’s verses” and quotes another two lines from a different Blunden poem. As he returns to the daylight, he observes, again quoting from Blunden, how “‘the curious air was over- burdened / With ancient echoes’” (187). Con-jured by Yeung’s memory, Blunden returns as a ghostly premonition and in verbal frag-ments. His visitation, as it dovetails Yeung’s own route, is broken up and his spectral pres-ence only partially glimpsed in his own lines, quoted out of context and further dissolved by the Keatsian phrase—“murmurous haunt”—into earlier Romantic poetry. Appropriated in this way by Yeung, Blunden becomes the hallucinatory gesture that articulates his stu-dent’s creative subjectivity.

In less explicit ways, the essay inscribes a movement more radical—and worldly—than Blunden’s dissolution and spectral return. Yeung notices that the tunnels, once used as trenches by the British soldiers defending Hong Kong against the Japanese, have “such evoking names as ‘Shaftesbury Avenue,’ ‘Haymarket,’ ‘Piccadilly Circus’ and ‘Ox-ford Street.’” “Trench Nomenclature” is the title of a poem from Blunden’s Undertones of War (310). But the Asian Blunden’s murmur-ing undertone also resonates as Yeung reads the Japanese characters scratched next to the London place- names, denoting “the name and nature of a military unit . . . who had

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occupied the place” after the British soldiers were driven out (187). In the face of this “as-tonishing” encounter, Yeung, jolted momen-tarily out of his ponderous musings, cries:

Flanders, Hong Kong, Ypres, the Shing Mun Redoubt, Europe, Asia or 1941, 1914, does the difference in time and places really matter? As I stood over the ruins on these hills, I was sud-denly conscious of the subtle but overwhelm-ing power of Blunden’s verses, sweeping and echoing over two generations and two conti-nents thousands of miles apart, surviving all as an immutable ‘fountain, / Tears of joy and music’s rally.’ Indeed the unacknowledged legislator and prophet of mankind. (188)

The final sentence, like “murmurous haunt,” is, of course, not from Blunden. In these plu-ral intertextual references, the essay’s testi-mony to the tenacity of the master- apprentice bond also bears witness to an apprenticeship in En glish literature. But intermixed with the essay’s provincial concerns, the encounter in the trenches reveals an incipient conscious-ness of a shifting world where names and lan-guage become displaced as culturally specific signs and replaced and combined to form other places and other times; of East and West suddenly compressed into a litany of in-terconnectible places and events—“Flanders . . . the Shing Mun Redoubt . . . Asia” . . . 1941, 1914”; and of the essay’s concomitant emer-gence, in Hong Kong in 1961, into a global cultural geography. In traveling through a Hong Kong war site, Yeung has journeyed to many worlds.

Like Yeung’s essay, Choy’s poem “Yald-ing” is structured by both tribute and dis-tance, but in “Yalding,” a demarcation of distance is very much the conscious aim. Choy wrote her poem from Saint Hilda’s Col-lege, Oxford. The languages of En glish poets—Keats, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, Shakespeare—circulate in Choy’s poem, showing her consonance with Blunden as poet and mentor, but the image of

a model student who has learned her lesson well is repeatedly unsettled by a critical irony, insidious and poignant, about the poem’s in-habitation by Blunden and En glish poetry. On one level, the six- stanza poem strikes a note of formality and deference. Stanzas 1, 3, and 5 describe visits to the three important land-marks of Blunden’s life—“Yalding,” his birth-place, “Kinton fields,” where he grew up, and “Ancre,” the Great War battlefield where many of his comrades died. In these stanzas, Choy addresses Blunden as an acolyte who is taken to where the master’s creative inspiration abides. She is inducted by the master himself into the mystery of origins; this is a consider-able privilege, and she appears mesmerized: “You live, we learn,” she is moved to say.

Stanzas 2, 4, and 6, however, show her addressing Blunden in a different tone:

But you have ruined us for a world of lies. What though you made, beneath the hard bleached skies, The cool shy primrose spring before our very eyes And flung around us cloaks of brilliant dyes. . . . . . . . . . . . . Walls, black and rooted deep as your bright growth Fling withering shade on every gentle quest. The truth Of glorious minds yet does not make us ague- proof Against the chill of minds that smile, and smiling, hold aloof.. . . . . . . . . Thus may I, swept and pinnacled alone In this bell- golden town of lightening stone See in each new woe the wild uncommon undertone Of deeper knowledge and of final peace. This you have done.

In these stanzas, Choy’s emergent creative self strives against its origins in Blunden and En glish literature. Bitter and accusatory, she uses the language of strong precursors to turn on someone who, for her, is the stron-

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gest of them all: “But you have ruined us for a world of lies . . . And flung around us cloaks of brilliant dyes.” Blunden’s companionship and guidance and “the golden world of En-glish literature” have ill prepared his devoted students for the hypocrisy, meanness, and cold- shouldering that lay in store for them. Here, Choy speaks not only for herself but for an entire cohort, the remnants of a heroic enterprise sadly betrayed. Hers is the tremu-lous anger of exclusion—“Against the chill of minds that smile, and smiling, hold aloof ”—the feeling of an outsider, “swept and pinna-cled alone,” in a world that seduced her across its borders and then callously denied her. The “truth” distilled from Blunden’s experience and teaching and from En glish poetry does not help much in a world of lies and cold ci-vilities. Blunden is clearly aware of this sense of alienation and tries to redress it in his es-say on Japanese scholars in En gland; in shar-ing with Choy the private landscapes of his creativity, he attempts another personal in-tervention. Choy’s poem is a postcolonial it-eration that disrupts the closure of Blunden’s essay; its pointed ambivalence about his companionship questions the conception of a hospitable and quiescent literary commu-nity that could be called “imagination’s com-monwealth.” Her utterance, poignant and portentous, from the citadel of metropolitan learning that is Oxford—also Blunden’s uni-versity—confronts his homely world with the spectacle of its unhomely issue and with her own subjectivity in its brooding resentment and struggle for self- reconciliation.

The worth and commitment Blunden as-cribes to his students as makers and citizens of imagination’s commonwealth develop a post-colonial turn in Yeung and Choy, whose es-say and poem speak of displacement, cultural translation, and the struggle through art to-ward identity and self- determination. The fact that the dialogue is in En glish and mediated by En glish literature as a subject in a colonial university raises the question of elitism, one

that has shadowed postcolonial theory and its practitioners. Against a nativist- nationalist strand in postcolonial studies, anglophonism is also a sign of unbelonging. As their names recorded in the Festschrift indicate, the stu-dents were not all Chinese, but far from being ungrounded sojourners, they were from fami-lies who had resided in Hong Kong for gen-erations. En glish is the lingua franca of this nonethnocentric, localized formation of what Bruce Robbins has called “actually existing cosmopolitanism.” The gathering of these stu-dents, who were privileged but also curtailed under a colonial regime, in a literary endeavor announces the possibility of commonality not predicated on race and ethnicity. As an im-provisation of literary globality amid the cold war, their collective work elaborates a Hong Kong referent that pushes against nation and empire as boundaries of culture. The students transmute and pluralize Blunden’s imagina-tion’s commonwealth into a culture of praise and blame, otherness and autonomy as En-glish literature becomes anglophone.

Notes

I thank the Research Grants Council (HK) for a grant supporting the research and writing of this essay.

1. On the factors contributing to Hong Kong’s sur-vival as a colony in an age of decolonization, see Louis; Tsang, Democracy and Modern History, pt. 3. The Hong Kong census reports recorded a rise in population from around 600,000 immediately after World War II to 2.5 million in 1955, mostly attributable to refugee arrivals from mainland China.

2. In an earlier essay (2006), I discuss the founding aims of Hong Kong University in 1911–12 as formulated by its first chancellor, the colonial governor Frederick “African” Lugard. In the expanding British Empire be-fore World War I, Lugard’s vantage on governmental-ity, in which an education in En glish for “natives” was a central cultural platform, had a pan- Asian prospect that drew on British experiences in India.

3. At Oxford in 1926, the teenage W. H. Auden, look-ing at John Betjeman’s collection of poetry, picked out the Blunden volumes. Auden exclaimed, “I see you have

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got something genuine. . . . [H]e’s a good poet” (Chau, Lo, and Yung 27). Nineteen twenty-six is important because Betjeman, after relating the incident, adds that by that date, poets like Blunden who contributed to the London Mercury were going out of fashion. This suggests that Leavis’s judgment, apparently idiosyncratic, actually re-flects a prevailing view. However, his judgment is neither consensual nor able to lay exclusive claim to being mod-ern, as the young Auden’s remarks show.

4. For a criticism and revision of Fussell’s work, see the collection of essays in Quinn and Trout.

5. Kerr’s more recent essay shows how the desire for healing and relief moves Blunden to transform Hong Kong scenes and landscapes into imaginary safe havens so that time and again “[t]he signs reappear of the . . . world of En glish nature, and En glish poetry” (104). In glossing Blunden’s “En glishness” and the way it enters into the psychological economy of the troubled war vet-eran, Kerr reopens from a Hong Kong context the issue of Blunden in modernity.

6. Cobden- Sanderson, who published the study, was Blunden’s publisher. Blunden’s network, if not his actual patronage, is evidently involved in the book’s publication.

7. Lee’s quasi- autobiographical account of his experi-ence as a law student in early-1950s London was not pub-lished until 2003.

8. Blunden traveled to Germany with his student at Oxford, Paul Engle, who later set up the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. On this trip, he seemed to have voiced anti- Semitic views and appeared at his “most gullible” (Webb 215). In Hong Kong, the local En glish- language news-paper, the Standard, attacked Blunden, who led the uni-versity visit to the mainland (Webb 299). On his return, Blunden made an official statement that was reported in the London Times.

9. For a short survey of some of the ideological and geopolitical divisions that have shaped sinophone Hong Kong literature since the 1950s, see Tay, who draws on his own Chinese publications. Tay does not mention either Blunden or Eastern Horizon.

10. The journal was not overtly propagandist for the Chinese communist regime—at least not under Liu. Tolerated in Hong Kong, it had a different reception in parts of the British Empire confronted with communist- led anticolonial movements. In its first year, the journal was banned by the Malayan government, newly emerged from the so- called emergency, or war, against communist insurgents (Bin Abdul Latiff).

11. In 1955, amid the tensions of the cold war, a his-toric meeting of twenty-nine so- called nonaligned na-tions took place in Bandung, Indonesia. Many prominent “Third-World” leaders who fought against European co-lonialism attended, including the host nation’s Sastro-amidjojo, India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Nkrumah from Gold Coast, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, and Zhou Enlai from communist China. The Western media largely ig-

nored this meeting. For a perceptive and critical account of the meeting from the vantage of an interested outsider, see Richard Wright.

12. Furthermore, Eastern Horizon’s apparent naïveté was belied, and beleaguered, by its own news-roundup page, which in every issue (1960–64) contained sum-mary reports of the different cold war fronts. The July 1962 issue syndicated a Reuters report on protests in Laos against the stationing of American troops in Thailand—a military presence that marked another significant stage in the progress toward the Vietnam War.

13. Liu died in a plane crash en route to the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the United Arab Republic in Cairo in 1962.

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