Summary

The final two chapters of Dyer’s book are much shorter than the previous ones and can be summarized together. In “There’s Nothing I Can Do! Nothing!” Dyer reaffirms his previous statement that “the processes of imperialism express, in representation, white identities” (184) by focusing in particular on the TV show “Jewel in the Crown, which ran in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. This show, argues Dyer, provides a perfect example of the way in which white women, as in other colonialist fiction, “voice a liberal critique of empire and are in part to blame for its decline. Because of their social marginality and because, when they do anything, they do harm, the only honorable position for them, the only really white position, is that of doing nothing” (205-206). Dyer first provides an in-depth...