Anti-Imperial Literacy, the Humanities, and Universality in Raymond Williams’s Late Work

Abstract

Towards the end of his career, and ultimately of his life, Raymond Williams returned repeatedly to a set of concerns whose interconnection is not immediately apparent upon simple enumeration: the relation of writing to power, the ideology of modernism, anti-imperial resistance, a critique of the nation-state, the history and culture of Wales, a call for a new, collaborative conception of the humanities, and the seemingly obscure term “distance.” Together they form a dense web of mutual presupposition which, taken in its totality, amounts to a highly original body of socialist thought that remains of paramount importance. In what follows I attempt to delineate what is at stake in each element and the ways in which they inform one another. I begin by considering the trajectory of the puzzlingly insistent term “distance” throughout Williams’s oeuvre, for its various semantic permutations become central to his influential account of modernism. Likewise, his account of modernism connects directly to his reflections on nationalism, the imperial British state and Welsh history. Having elaborated upon these interconnections, and defended Williams against Paul Gilroy’s now canonical accusation that his approach to nationalism reproduces the presuppositions of the “new racism,” I shall turn to a detailed reading of a remarkable but little-studied presidential address to the Classical Association given by Williams in 1984, and posthumously published as “Writing, Speech and the ‘Classical.’” The address combines, in concentrated form, many of the recurring concerns of his late work, and develops a highly suggestive theory of universality. I conclude with some brief remarks that attempt to draw together these separate strands in a more condensed manner so as to articulate the direct relevance of Williams’s late work to contemporary movements to “decolonise” the university, and to spell out the Utopian potential of Williams’s unique democratic vision.