Imperial nostalgia at the periphery: Harking back in John Harris’s Harkaway’s Sixth Column

This study examines the afterlife of empire in the fictional remembering and refiguring of an episode of British colonial loss as victory. John Harris’s Harkaway’s Sixth Column (1983) is a popular adventure novel set in the Second World War in East Africa. It dramatizes a Somali uprising against the occupying Italian army, led by the eponymous British soldier, Harkaway, and a motley crew, who encapsulate a nostalgic ideal of British imperialism, including a fearless female missionary, an Irish squaddie, an Afrikaner mechanic, and Harkaway himself. The study puts Harris’s novel into conversation with its historical moment of production, specifically the Falklands conflict, through a mobilisation of Bakhtin’s chronotope of the alien world in adventure time. In doing so, I argue for the significance of geographical peripheries in the ongoing construction of imperial nostalgia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.