Europe and Empire is a complex and highly engaging book written from three conflictual and ultimately irreconcilable perspectives: the British, the Italian and the Maltese perspective. In many respects, as the readers delve into the 22 chapters that make up Prof. Henry Frendo’s book, the story being recounted gradually takes on the cast of a story of triangulated desire, of conflict and turmoil, of rivalry and deceit, of complicity and resistance in which three perspectives, each with its own distinctive agenda, coexist and interact with one another. The backdrop of such a story, whose focus of attention is the period between 1912-1946, is the massively knotted and multi-layered history of the growing presence of the British Empire in the Mediterranean, as it extends its rule from Tangier to Gibraltar to Malta and Cyprus, from the Ionian Islands to Egypt to Palestine. It is against this backdrop that Prof. Frendo explores a series of interconnected experiences that primarily have to do with the conflict between nationalism and imperialism, tradition and modernity, assimilation and resistance.

In analysing these years of intense confrontational engagement, which saw Malta tortuously progressing towards nationhood, Prof. Frendo adopts a methodological procedure that posits “a theory of the margins”. In a particularly suggestive passage which deserves to be quoted at some length, Prof. Frendo writes: “In searching for Malta through her ‘language question’ over the past two centuries, this comparative study posits a theory of the margins: where empires meet, periphery reaches out for mainstream, both revealing and transforming itself in the process. Moreover, under colonialism, in their quests for national identity and political freedoms, opponents may often see the light through iron bars, while ‘pragmatic’ collaboration patterns come into operation.” The key notion of marginality allows Prof. Frendo to analyse the colonial experience as a “discrepant experience”, as Edward Said would put it, an experience that is shaped at one and the same time by moments of anti-colonial resistance and moments of complicity, or collaboration between the colonised and the coloniser. Neither fully subjected to power nor fully in possession of it, in the years leading to and following Malta’s transition from colonial rule to self-government, the Maltese as depicted in Europe and Empire, lived in an interstitial zone of in-betweenness, suspended between what is central and what is marginal.

Despite the apparently binary structure of such an analysis, by positing a theory of liminality and indeterminacy, Prof. Frendo moves beyond the limits and pitfalls of a Manichean opposition between one category and another, and focuses instead on how these categories can be blurred, eroded, or even reversed, and how the mainstream can become marginal, the central peripheral, and vice versa. As Prof. Frendo writes, sifting out the nationality traits resulting from the clash of competing interests or powers often becomes “an exercise in shading boundaries, mounting fringes, tying ends, and rounding edges”. The fluidity of boundaries between opposing categories is perhaps best mirrored in the so-called Maltese language question, one of the many crucial issues analysed in detail in Europe and Empire on which I have chosen to concentrate in what follows.

At the beginning of this review, I referred to the cultural and political tension in Malta between the occupied and the occupier as the tension that is reminiscent of a story of triangulated desire. One of the objects of desire that was most ardently sought in this story by three distinct contenders is precisely language. Significantly enough, during the period on which the book focuses, the diglossia, which is typical of most colonised countries, becomes complicated by a limited triglossia, or trilingualism, a feature that gives the language question in Malta its distinctive cast. One example provided by Prof. Frendo of the ambiguous nature of this triangulated relationship is the way in which the English language managed to penetrate the civil service, commerce, education, and publication but not the more sedimented layers of culture, as Italian had done. The situation becomes even more complicated when both Giuseppe Muscat Azzopardi, known as the father of Maltese literature, and Dun Karm Psaila, Malta’s national poet, started by writing in Italian in the interwar period and then moving to Maltese. The result is once again one of interstitiality, in-betweenness and indeterminacy. In an incisive passage on the relationship between Maltese, Italian and English, Prof. Frendo writes: “Neither quite Italian nor properly English. Apart from historical memory and legend, the Maltese Islands had retained, as a culture carrier, the in-group Maltese vernacular. Even if seemingly in hibernation, and however unofficial, this medium survived one foreign occupation after another. It belonged to the islands; and the islanders, to a greater or lesser extent, consciously or unconsciously, belonged to it.” It thus follows that even if the language factor can never be “the sole criterion determining nationality”, as Prof. Frendo acknowledges, language can turn into an extraordinary medium of power, a tool through which the legacies of imperialism can, to a certain extent, be disempowered consciously and unconsciously, voluntarily and involuntarily.

To conclude, Prof. Frendo’s work maps out an archaeology for knowledge that urges us to look beyond the surface of historical actualities. In the process, his analysis of the unrelenting dialogue between adversial cultures and their orders of meaning calls for a greater appreciation and acceptance of the differences that marked the interwar period in Malta.

In October, a 17-programme series entitled “L-Ewropa u l-Imperu” based on the volume’s 22 chapters and directed by Charles Xuereb, will start being aired on Campus FM