"The Produce of More Than One Country": Race, Identity, and Discourse in Post-Windrush Britain

Abstract

Is it necessarily true that colonial and postcolonial relationships are characterized by the power to name on the one hand, and the passive acceptance of naming on the other? The Prospero/Caliban archetype remains a powerful image in post colonial studies and continues to be a useful tool for exploring some of the psychological and material consequences of Imperialism. It does, however, run the risk of focussing the mind disproportionately upon Caliban's subjection and Prospero's authority. In part, this rather unilateral arrangement can be traced back to the work of two of the pioneering figures of post-colonial theory, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon explores the traumatic psychological effects of colonialism upon the colonized. Cast as the permanently inferior Other of their white imperial masters, the colonized subjects of Empire internalize the values of colonial discourse to the detriment of their own self-image and identity. In Ngugi's terms, decolonising the mind, becomes an essential act of resistance to, and recovery from, the experience of empire.1 Edward Said's seminal text, Orientalism (1978), adopts a different perspective. Focussing instead upon the colonizers, he identifies a number of different strategies which produce and define the colonized through impe-