Remembering Colonialism: Race and Identity Formation in Post-war Britain

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This thesis investigates collective memory of British colonialism and ongoing structural racism in the UK. In 2016, a review by the Equality and Human Rights Commission highlighted deep racial inequalities across employment, education, crime, living standards, and healthcare. As Britain prepares to leave the EU and conservative political rhetoric stirs a resurgent English nationalism, social justice and the representation of racial identity are increasingly salient issues. The project will examine these through an epistemological framework combining memory studies, postcolonial studies and Critical Race Theory (CRT). The three fields share a fundamental core in providing revisionary critiques of dominant social, cultural and political texts: each discipline considers how public discourse forms social identities. However, interdisciplinary convergence between these fields faces challenges posed by the particular national contexts shaping their inquiry. In Britain, memories of world wars and the Holocaust eclipse colonial memory (Schofield, 2013; Pearce, 2014). The thesis will confront these challenges. Building on memory work's excavation of socio-cultural sites and texts as key indicators of national self-determination (Assmann, 2010; Halbwachs, 1992; Nora, 1989), the project will explore Britain's relationship with colonial history through contemporary commemorative practice.While postcolonial studies and memory studies have strong credentials as international disciplines, CRT is largely particular to the race-conscious critique of 'liberal assumptions' in US civil rights law from which it emerged (Crenshaw et. al, 1995; Warmington, 2012). On this basis, CRT in Britain has faced struggles due to its own national context (Chakrabarty et. al, 2012). Existing scholarship in postcolonial memory provides useful paradigms for the thesis' consideration of colonial legacies, racial subordination and the interconnection of European warfare and colonial disavowal (Craps, 2013; Rothberg, 2009). However, present focus on transcultural literary forms has left scholarship on the British case undeveloped. Such perspectives underpin the research questions: How has cultural memory of black history in the UK and US informed the development of CRT in each nation? How can the paradigm of 'multidirectional memory' uncover British postcolonial sentiment in contemporary memorial practice? Can a convergence between memory studies and CRT create new paradigms for countering white hegemonic cultural praxis?The project's structure reflects each question. Part 1 will explore commemorative speeches given at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture and the Black Cultural Archives (BCA) in Brixton, to examine the national contexts through which racial subordination comes into being. Part 2 will consider the 'multidirectionality' - temporal, political and geographical implications - of UK-funded commemoration for national identity formation: the first memorial to African and Caribbean service personnel unveiled in Brixton on Windrush Day in 2017, the Mau Mau memorial unveiled in Nairobi in 2015, and the new Holocaust memorial set to open in 2021 by Westminster Palace. Part 3 will examine the relationship between public and private experience of racial prejudice in Britain through new oral histories, conducted with activists attached to the BCA and Brixton's local community via semi-structured interviews. The methodology is thus comparative and interdisciplinary: combining methods from cultural studies with those specific to CRT, the project will generate a productive dialogue on the constitution of racial oppression in the British context. It will contribute to CRT scholarship in Britain through a new analytical framework, also furthering its credentials as an international discipline (Chakrabarty et. al, 2012).