Postwar Caribbean migration exposed Britain’s latent imperial racial stereotypes
Evidence
Postwar black migration, beginning in earnest with the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948, transformed the face of British society and brought British identity itself into question. It touched a deep reservoir of negative and stereotypical attitudes in Britain about racialized difference—a legacy inherited from Britain’s imperial role and brought to the surface by the arrival of significant numbers of black migrants from the Caribbean on the “home territory” of a society which imagined itself to be liberal, tolerant, and racially homogeneous. Paul Gilroy calls the pathological response of an old imperial society like Britain to the decline of its power a form of “post-colonial melancholia”—the unrequited grieving for a lost object that easily turns phobic. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1055 (
#corroborates, via linked claim)
However, as James Procter notes, “while the inclusive nature of ‘black’ in the 1970s offered a way of overcoming cultural ‘differences,’ it also led to the suppression of difference in presenting a unified front against racism. ‘Black’ was forced to conceal and perpetuate a range of inequalities and tensions internal to the imagined community it drew together.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 151 (
#expands, via linked claim)
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
Related
- Post-imperial Britain grieves its lost power into racial phobia (similarity 0.91)
- Postwar Black and Asian migration challenged settled British identity as a new phenomenon. (similarity 0.83)
- Britain’s imperial legacy turned black migration into phobic post-colonial melancholia (similarity 0.82)
- Caribbean and African migration made race central to postwar British politics and cultural studies (similarity 0.81)
- Postwar multiculturalism changed form with no linear colonial connection (similarity 0.80)
- Postwar migrants followed empire’s pathways while Britain disavowed that connection (similarity 0.78)
- Encountering metropolitan England’s racism shattered colonial Blacks’ faith in the Empire. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Britain’s imperial legacy turned black migration into phobic post-colonial melancholia
#corroborates(0.85) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1055 - Post-imperial Britain grieves its lost power into racial phobia
#corroborates(0.80) - The unifying 1970s category of black suppressed internal differences among nonwhite Britons.
#expands(0.60) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 151