Postcolonial Britain Research Articles

Live and let live: The Black 007 in No Time To Die

ABSTRACT No Time To Die (2021) saw the arrival of a Black British 007 as protagonist in the James Bond film franchise. The Black 007 Nomi was played by Black British actress Lashana Lynch with diasporic ethnic and cultural connections to Jamaica. These references are taken up in the film in the context of a late-modern postcolonial Britain. No Time To Die is an interesting case in the Bond film franchise and in scholarly studies of James Bond as it allows us to think through issues of race, gender, representation, and belonging vis-à-vis an ongoing debate amongst Bond mania in the British media around the idea of a Black James Bond. This article examines the representation of Nomi as the Black 007 in this film, focussing on the cultural politics of race, gender, and Black Britishness, alongside the postcolonial and diasporic qualities of her character that the film embraces.

Public service media and race relations in postcolonial Britain: BBC and immigrant programming, 1965–1988

This article explores how British Asians negotiated the politics of race in the formative years of British broadcasting from the 1960s to the 1980s. Marked by significant changes within the BBC and British society at large, this period saw the first institutional initiatives oriented towards Caribbean and Asian communities. Drawing on primary research materials from the BBC Written Archives, we analyse the Immigrant Programmes Unit and the Immigrant Programme Advisory Committees as sites where ideas of race, ethnicity and citizenship were continually debated and worked out. We argue that the BBC functioned as a profoundly asymmetrical contact zone in which British Asians’ efforts to counter assimilationist ideas and programmes were stymied by senior managers working with deeply ingrained ideas of cultural, ethnic and racial differences. Immigrants would be accommodated, but in ways that would not challenge the viewing habits of the majority or imagine solidarities across racial, ethnic and national lines.

Et si on changeait la musique? Déterminants sociaux des préférences pour le hip‐hop, le rap et les musiques urbaines en Grande Bretagne

This article examines the social determinants of hip-hop culture in Britain. Using data from the Great Britain Class Survey and drawing on work done over the last twenty years on the roots and development of hip-hop culture and rap music in Britain, it shows that preference for hip-hop music has a dual elective affinity with status-dominated groups in postcolonial Britain ̶ such as social agents identifying as "Black, Black British, Caribbean and African" and the dominated classes. Through this object of study, it is possible to rethink the heuristic character of the distinction between class and status.

Politics of Haya: Embodied Materiality of Piety as Everyday Resistance among British Muslim Women in Ayisha Malik's Fiction

Abstract This article explores how an ethical practice of modesty, represented in Ayisha Malik’s novels Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged (2015), and The Other Half of Happiness (2017), serves as an act of everyday resistance in the context of the issue of gender inequality in postcolonial South Asian Britain. It attempts to understand how religious modalities of agency, shown in the form of wearing hijab, operate against the dominant structures of power. However, drawing on Saba Mahmood’s theorisation of women’s agency in Politics of Piety (2004) as an embodied modality of action rather than simply a synonym for resistance to social norms, this article further argues that the female body in this fiction reshapes the understanding of religious experience through the conception of an embodied materiality of everyday resistance.

Gilbert and George's 1980 Pictures and the Spectre of Nationalism in Postcolonial Britain

With their hallucinatory juxtapositions of medieval English iconography, imperial‐era public statuary, and indicators of contemporary urban unrest, Gilbert and George's monumental 1980 Pictures marked what many initial critics perceived as an unsettlingly political turn in the duo's work – even, some alleged, a gesture of identification with Britain's neo‐fascist right. In fact, this essay argues, much of Gilbert and George's preceding work, including their collages of Edwardian‐era picture postcards, and their canonical performances of The Singing Sculpture, was similarly oriented toward questions of national identity and belonging in a manner more philosophical than propagandistic. At a moment marked by an ascendant if internally contested effort by the political right to reconceptualize ‘Britishness’ for a postcolonial age, the artists used their self‐appointed roles as ‘living sculptures’ to emphasize the discontinuities, contradictions, and instabilities inherent to the construct of British identity, stoking an emerging set of anxieties regarding the street‐level legibility of political partisanship in a highly polarized London.

Televising the Partition of British India

2017 marked the 70th anniversary of the end of colonial rule in British India and of the division of the country into the two independent states of India and Pakistan. To commemorate the event, in August 2017, the BBC broadcast a series of programmes focused specifically on Partition. Focusing on My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947, this article analyses the programme’s structure and rhetorical strategies, with particular reference to its representation of the empire and of contemporary postcolonial Britain. We argue that the show, by merging personal and national histories, successfully promotes an inclusive perspective on Britishness, in line with the BBC’s inclusivity remit, which also emphasises the multicultural character of Britain as a result of its colonial history. The emphasis on individualised account of suffering and resilience, however, leaves Partition circumscribed within the ‘temporary madness’ narrative, thus limiting the show’s engagement with the politics of colonialism and decolonisation.

Multiculturalism, Biotechnology, and Biopolitics in Zadie Smith’sWhite Teeth

AbstractThis article traces the critical reception of Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth (2000) to argue that both neoliberal and neoconservative interpretations of her work (and personal celebrity) have distorted the novel’s critique of contemporary biopolitics as a project of debilitating inclusion and racial eugenics. Rather than treating White Teeth as a “hysterical” or “naive” celebration of multiculturalism, this essay, focused on the ending of the novel, instead argues that White Teeth not only anticipates criticisms of multiculturalism as an inadequate model of belonging but also, more importantly, demonstrates a biopolitical understanding of race as a category that manages the distribution of life chances in postcolonial Britain. Drawing on work by Jasbir Puar, Achille Mbembe, and Luce Irigaray, this reframing of White Teeth opens new connections between her early work and her more recent “pessimistic” novels, such as Swing Time.

Normativity, Marginality, and Deviance in a Psychiatric Placement: A Parallel Process

This article explores links between normativity, marginality, and deviance via the experiences of the author, a trainee psychotherapist on a psychiatric placement in an American mental health emergency services unit. Drawing on her own experience as a woman of Sri Lankan heritage living in postcolonial Great Britain, she weaves together themes of identity, power, and marginalization, asking questions about the lived experience of those who are positioned as deviant by normative society. She uses the work of social and political theorists to illustrate how such themes are integrated at a wider group level. Two distinct forms of writing are used as a self-reflexive mechanism offering both personal revelation and critical analysis: the autoethnographical and the theoretical as a method of intersubjective textual speculation on that which lies in and outside of awareness. The author holds the view that there are gains to be made when we place psychotherapeutic concerns back into the world in which we live.

Dance, Diaspora and the Role of the Archives: A Dialogic Reflection upon the Black Dance Archives Project (UK)

The Black Dance Archives project collected materials that record the activities of black British artists who created and performed dance predominantly in the later years of the twentieth century. Through the form of a dialogue we bring the perspective of the dance producer who led the project together with a more academic interest in the potential of the materials collected to contribute to dance research. Our shared reflections reveal how a focus on archiving the work of dance artists of diasporic heritage emphasises that dance, as a form of intangible cultural heritage, is particularly vulnerable to becoming lost to future generations. This leads to reflections upon the role of dance archives within the context of post-colonial Britain that brings to the fore some of the complexities of the archival process and the significance of how this project resulted in materials being dispersed across different institutions.

Refusing Reform, Reworking Pity, or Reinforcing Privilege? The Multivalent Politics of Young People’s Fun and Friendship within a Volunteering Encounter

AbstractThis paper analyses initiatives which took British young people from ethnic minority and disenfranchised backgrounds to volunteer in sub‐Saharan Africa. It asks whether decolonial possibilities can be seen in the politics of youthful fun and friendship amid a practice undeniably driven by interpenetrating neocolonial logics, where enrolment in helping “needy” others is seen as a means to “improve” working‐class and racially marked youth. The paper argues that volunteers’ investments in leisure constituted a politics of refusal towards how they were acted upon as objects of concern. More ambivalently, playful, friendly interactions between British and African youth disrupted relations of charitable pity and signalled desires for solidarity and equality, but cannot be claimed as fully decolonial. At times, fun also re‐entrenched neocolonial and other oppressive relations. Overall, the paper demonstrates that a close reading of the multivalent, affective politics of young people’s fun and friendship can reveal much about the reproduction or subversion of contemporary neocolonial logics that operate both within and beyond the borders of postcolonial Britain.

“Keep the Balance”: The Politics of Remembering Empire in Postcolonial Britain

This article uses a memory studies lens to explore the inherent tension in discourses that defend empire in postcolonial Britain. It argues that many Britons try to reconcile their awareness of colonial violence, racism, and exploitation with their wish to view themselves in a positive light. This at a time when the memory of empire continues to be associated with British national identity in the present. It studies three phenomena that characterize much engagement with the imperial past: firstly, the acknowledgement of imperial wrongs within otherwise celebratory accounts; secondly, the idea that there is an empire-critical master narrative against which one must present a counter-memory in order to keep the balance; and thirdly, the defence of individual Britons that allows for a depoliticized endorsement of empire and liberates contemporary Britain of guilt. It uses the rhetoric of a number of authors, filmmakers, and politicians as the point of departure to study the politics of remembering empire in postcolonial Britain. It finds that the celebration of empire does not happen in spite of but through an engagement with the criticism of empire.

The dis/comfort of white British nationhood: encounters, otherness and postcolonial continuities

ABSTRACT Recent work on the affective dimensions of nationhood, identity and belonging has often overlooked discomfort in favour of positive experiences of sameness and security. Contrary to this tendency, this paper, based on interview narratives produced with white British middle-class people in the suburbs of London, examines the role of discomfort in experiences of nationhood, as well as the nature and meaning of that discomfort. In the first part of the paper, I demonstrate how nationhood becomes in and through uncomfortable encounters with other people, places and objects. Then, in the second part, I show how, for some, the experience of becoming national in encounters with the ‘other’ is itself experienced uncomfortably in the context of a postcolonial Britain where people are expected to ‘love themselves as different’. On the one hand, the paper challenges the idea of privileged national belonging as wholly comfortable. Yet, the analysis also exposes the relative comfort of white British people’s nationhood. The paper offers important insight into the uneven and hierarchical nature of contemporary nationhood and highlights the value of attending to the entanglement of comfort and discomfort in work on affective nationalism.

Thinking Black: Britain 1964–1985. By Rob Waters

The story of the end of British imperial power is a familiar one; the flag coming down, the final sundowners sipped, the wanton violence and brutality which underlay neat narratives of ‘orderly’ transitions to power. Yet at the same time, Britain itself was shaped in critical ways by its imperial past. The nation and its people underwent a series of highly complex and intense psychological and physical experiences as they struggled to come to terms with its place in the world. The state of contemporary politics suggests that these debates remain unresolved. One critical aspect of the post-war era was an understanding of the very definition of who ‘Britons’ were and could be. Accentuated by post-war immigration from the ‘new’ Commonwealth, particularly the Caribbean and South Asia, the prospect of a predominantly white society confronting what some have called the Empire coming home spilled into ugly and vicious racial violence, disavowal of the imperial past and any sense of obligation to former imperial subjects, and the insidious insularity of Powellism—which reached its apotheosis in 1968 with the now infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (for this backlash see C. Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain). The 1970s were a time of unease, a time when both black and white felt that the British state had failed them and that the post-war consensus, with its levelling rhetoric of equality and fairness for all, was collapsing. In this context, Britain’s ethnic minorities, subject to both petty discrimination and terrifying mob violence, were prompted to engage in a series of renegotiations of their identity and sense of place. In Thinking Black, Rob Waters skilfully charts the evolution of black radicalism in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.

The (un)making of Bimshire and the Black Englishman: Barbadian nationalism in post-colonial Britain

ABSTRACTThis paper considers Partha Chatterjee’s [1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press] theory of anti-colonial nationalism – itself a response to Benedict Anderson [(1983) 2006. Imagined Communities. Reprint, London: Verso] – to understand how migrants from Barbados and their children construct their national identities in postcolonial Britain. Using interviews with first-, second- and third-generation Barbadian-Britons, it aims to determine what it means to be Barbadian, fifty years since independence, and how this identity has developed in the long shadow of colonialism and the more recent era of sovereignty. Guided by Chatterjee’s framework of spiritual and material nationalism, the findings locate Barbadian nationalism in the dynamic spiritual domain of family, racial consciousness and culture, unaffected by British aesthetic and institutions that have endured since the island’s occupation. How is this identity constructed within the borders of the former colonial power? This research locates the Caribbean within these competing discourses of nationalism, particularly nationalism as it responds and adapts to migration.

A New Research Agenda for the Study of Genetic Ancestry Tests and the Formation of Racial and Ethnic Identities and Ancestries

This paper sets out a new research agenda for the study of family historians’ (referred to as ‘genealogists’) use of genetic ancestry tests in the course of their family history research in postcolonial Britain. My focus is upon the ways in which the use of these tests shapes the formation of genealogists’ ethnic, racial, national, class and gender identities and their ancestries. I argue that, while there is some significant and important work on the ways in which African Americans and white Americans deploy these tests to trace their family histories, there is little comparable work in the context of postcolonial Britain. Drawing on sociological, anthropological and geographical research on identity, genetic ancestry testing and family history research, I set out some of the theoretical issues that research in this area in Britain should address, and outline possible methodologies and methods that will serve to bridge this gap in the current literature on race, ethnicity, identity and genealogy.

Transatlantic Contrafacta, Musical Formats, and the Creation of Political Culture in Revolutionary America

AbstractThis article investigates Revolutionary-era American political culture through contrafacta of the British anthem “God Save the King.” Before, during, and after the Revolution the tune was frequently set with new lyrics that addressed political topics. The formats through which the song circulated (it was disseminated widely in manuscript and print), shaped the meaning and reception of these various contrafacta. Tracking “God Save the King” through the eighteenth century reveals how the United States remained connected to Britain, even when the lyrics—and the goals of the Revolution—repudiated that bond. Song versions also provide a musical map of the fragmenting political landscape of the early Republic. Ultimately, the diversity of the formats and the song versions reveal the ambivalent relationship between postcolonial United States and Britain, as well as the diversity of political culture within the United States.

Doctor, Why Should I do this? The Role of Meaningfulness in Oncological Decision-Making

Adrian mole lives in multicultural, multi-faith post-colonial Britain, a Britain in which diversity in all its various shapes and forms is almost taken for granted. However, his confrontation with the possibility of prostate cancer reinforces what we know about White men’s relationship to serious illness in general and to prostate cancer in particular. We know prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and accounts for approximately 25% of all male cancer diagnoses in the United Kingdom (UK) [1]. We know that the incidence of prostate cancer varies according to age, family history and also ethnicity. Research carried out in the US and the UK highlights that Black (African and Caribbean) men have disproportionately higher risk (one in four men as compared to one in nine White men) of prostate cancer than their White counterparts.

The suburban paradox of conviviality and racism in postcolonial Britain

ABSTRACTTaking my cue from work on relations of interethnic conviviality in super-diverse cities across the globe, this paper examines the ways in which conviviality co-exists with racism as found in a suburban British town. My argument is that ethnographic attention to the proximity of interethnic relations of conviviality to racism is necessary to guard against overly celebratory accounts of conviviality that downplay everyday manifestations of racism. By situating my study of conviviality in a suburban town, my account begins to unpack the characteristics of convivial relations formed in suburban neighbourhoods as opposed to super-diverse cities often studied by ethnographers in this area of inquiry. I examine manifestations of interethnic relations between British Asian Muslims and white British residents of this town. In contrast to the mainstream images that depict British Asian Muslims as a potential threat to neighbourhood stability and national security, some white and British Asian Muslim residents formed neighbourly relationships of trust, care and mutual recognition with each other across ethnic, racial, religious, gender, class and generational differences. Yet, my analysis of these convivial relations reveals some paradoxical ways in which individuals’ experiences of interethnic relations co-exist with their xenophobic, racist and Islamophobic attitudes.

New postcolonial British genres: shifting the boundaries

Acknowledgments Introduction: Remapping Borders: Postcolonial Britain and Literary/Cinematic Genres 1. British Muslim Bildungsromane 2. Gothic Tales of Postcolonial England 3. The Subcultural Urban Novel 4. Multicultural British Comedy/The Comedy of Multicultural Britain Conclusion: Genre Revisited Bibliography Index

Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, by Camilla Schofield

Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain, by Camilla Schofield