Review of The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics by Sadhana Naithani

Abstract

We learn, on this fine book’s last page, that the “story-time of the British Empire was all the time.” Just as the sun never set on this global empire, the voices of the storytellers in its many realms were never silent, and these voices were perpetually gathered, in a remarkable fashion, at the empire’s epicenter, in the corridors of London’s Folk-Lore Society. It is the remarkable fashion of the gathering of these tales that concerns Sadhana Naithani, and she is at some pains to establish a few core realities of this process—to wit, that it reproduced the hierarchy of empire by erasing the “native” contribution to the enterprise and that it needs to be taken seriously as a distinctive practice of folkloristics that laid the foundation for subsequent folklore studies in Europe and North America.