A London sumting dis ...

Abstract

There are plenty of opportunities for sophistry in playing with the concept of postcoloniality. There may even be political gains to be made if the term can help to promote coalitions between marginalized and victimized people whose immiseration is a residual product of the shocks that followed the loss of Britain's empire. But the vicissitudes of most postcolonial theorizing hold scant appeal for me. The postcolonial character of contemporary London has a simple facticity which leaves it not really amenable to debate. The spirit in which our discussion of it is engaged during the next two days of this conference is therefore absolutely critical. We can appreciate London's cosmopolitan vernaculars, its vernacular cosmopolitanisms and the patterns of resistance to both. We will observe the city's ethnographic complexities. Its perverse heterocultural details may bring pleasure as well as fear, but the temptation to evaluate and assess contemporary London as though it could be a simpler, more homogeneous and less irreducibly diverse place is something we should regard with the utmost suspicion. That impulse is linked not only to fantasies of return to the imaginary homogeneity of past whiteness and the restoration of Britain's imperial status; it is also marked by the lingering suggestion that 'race', like the black bodies that are its primary bearers and signifiers, belongs elsewhere. In turn, this can feed the comforting idea that true-Brits have been suffering from the misguided social engineering of a race relations industry that has curbed their instinctive responses of suspicion and hatred with the blunt instrument of the law. At their worst, these views endorse an analysis of empire and colony as essentially unrelated to the ecologies of belonging created in the core of the old imperial system. Colonial history gets allocated and confined to its victims. Any postcolonial opportunities remain theirs alone. I want to suggest a different orientation that has the additional merit of bypassing any leftover agonizing about being black and British. It is premised on the idea that colonial cultures, aspi? rations and mentalities extended into and conditioned the life of this metropolis in the most intimate and comprehensive ways over long periods of time. The boundaries of postcoloniality became blurred, but its irreversibility now constitutes the starting point. From this angle, the basic idea of postcolonial London has such a clanging, vivid obviousness about it that to unwittingly endorse a game of 'postcolonial London for or against?' would be absurd. To engage in sport of that type brings new dangers now that the reinvention of conservatism is seeking new language and imagery with which to revive and legitimate the oldest of Ultranationalist and racist anxieties. The close associations between the history of Britain's phobic responses to the difficult presence of difference and the life of this city have been repeatedly overlooked. Sustained confrontations between same and different, black and white, native and interloper, have been staged for the benefit of the national community as a whole in urban environments, usually though not exclusively those that London has supplied. This politics of 'race' and representation has featured a cavalcade of mythic figures. Illegal immigrants and black power militants, maimed imams, muggers, dreads, posses, Yardies, steamers, gangsters, fundamentalists and Holy Smokes are only a few of the horrifying characters that have brought inner London's testing encounters with Middle England to vivid life. Their potency was enhanced where they were revealed to prey upon the wholesome, beleaguered and inappropriately tolerant responses of lost and lonely people whose roots went deeper into the local landscape than the immigrants could ever manage. Conservative and nationalist opponents of Britain's postcolonial culture produced grim evidence drawn from the destruction and transformation of London's inner cities to support their cause. In their populist political imagination, new commonwealth immi? grants completed the tasks that Hitler's Luftwaffe had been unable to accomplish. The noisy alien encampments that had sprung up where peace and quiet had formerly reigned supplied incontrovertible proof of a catastrophic confrontation between incompatible cultures and civilizations. Charles Moore, now editor of the Telegraph, spoke for this tendency in his 1982 response to Lord Scarman's report on the Brixton riots. He offered a memorable diagnosis of Lambeth's ills that linked mass immigration to the other statist perfidies of modernizing Labour in government: Unhappiness exists because an old and coherent way of life has been broken up, not really by the ordinary passage of time, or even by