Postwar migrants followed empire’s pathways while Britain disavowed that connection
Evidence
The old relations of colonization, slavery, and colonial rule, linking Britain with the Empire for over four hundred years, marked out the pathways which these migrants followed. But these historic relations of dependency and subordination were reconfigured—in the now-classic postcolonial way—when reconvened on domestic British soil. In the wake of decolonization, and masked by a collective amnesia about, and systematic disavowal of, empire (which descended like a Cloud of Unknowing in the 1960s), this encounter was interpreted as “a new beginning.” Most British people looked at these “children of empire” as if they could not imagine where “they” had come from, why, or what possible connection they could have with Britain. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 327
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The ‘collective amnesia and systematic disavowal of empire’ is a mechanism central to how race and nation operate — feeds directly into Islamophobia’s analysis of how Muslim presence in the West is treated as alien and unconnected to colonial history.
- QUESTION: The ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ masking of empire — how does this disavowal mechanism recur in contemporary anti-Muslim discourse that denies any Western responsibility for current Muslim-world conditions?
Related
- Colonial relations predetermined migrant pathways but were willfully forgotten as a new beginning (similarity 0.93)
- Postcolonial multiculturalism has no linear causal link to its colonial past (similarity 0.80)
- Postwar multiculturalism changed form with no linear colonial connection (similarity 0.80)
- Postwar Black and Asian migration challenged settled British identity as a new phenomenon. (similarity 0.79)
- Postwar Caribbean migration exposed Britain’s latent imperial racial stereotypes (similarity 0.78)