“There'll Always Be an England”: Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948–1968

Abstract

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.

Screening Solidarity in Late 1960s Britain: Racism, Anti-Apartheid, and a Televised Debate

“…Huddleston's stand as an anti-racist warrior whose time in a former imperial post had generated solidarity rather than exclusive forms of nationalism, demonstrates how post-imperial society continued to be impacted by empire even during the process of winding it down. The Huddleston-Powell debate strongly attests to the need to eliminate the divide in scholarship between domestic and imperial historiographies-an undertaking begun by historians of race and immigration over the course of the last decade (Bailkin 2012;Burkett 2013;Hall and Rose 2006;Matera 2015;Schofield 2013;Schwarz 2011;Webster 2001).…”

Boxing, Race, and British Identity, 1945–1962

“…97 The depth of the imagined link between black men and physical brutality should not be underestimated and it was reinforced through the 1950s by the depictions of savage black men in British colonial films. 98 Inevitably, the white man came out on top in those films and black boxers too were sometimes imagined as lazy, physically flawed and thus ultimately inferior. 99 Boxing was regarded as a skilful art rather than just a demonstration of brute force and Edwardian black fighters had been regarded as lacking the necessary science to be fully effective.…”

Contesting the Visualization of Gaza

“…The categorization of those that resist colonialism as inhuman has a long history and was often used to delegitimize resistance by the colonized and construct them as savage and autocratic (Webster 2001;Pieterse 1992). As Butler has argued, humanness rather than an attribute of all human beings is used as a differential norm where human has a value which is attributed to some human beings and not to others.…”