‘The hollow shell of nationality’: Competing nationalisms and the emergence of dictatorship in David Caute’s At Fever Pitch

In its depiction of the hijacking of the African nationalist movement by a self-serving African middle-class, David Caute’s At Fever Pitch (1959) disrupts unilinear conceptions of British literature of decolonisation and complicates contemporary postcolonial debates around nationalist ideology and practice. Synchronic and diachronic accounts of British literature and the end of Empire have tended to focus on a shared preoccupation with imperial retrenchment (Taylor 1993, Sinfield 1997: 2004, Esty 2004), while the re-emergence of regionalism and state control in developing countries since decolonisation has led many postcolonial critics to view nationalism, as Laura Chrisman holds, as ‘inherently dominatory, absolutist, essentialist and destructive’ (2004: 183). In At Fever Pitch, however, Caute foregrounds the complex transition to independence in Africa and depicts the emergence of a totalitarian form of nationalism as a legacy of British colonial rule.