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

本论文考察了英国殖民主义的集体记忆和英国正在进行的结构性种族主义。2016年，平等与人权委员会的一项审查强调了就业、教育、犯罪、生活水平和医疗保健方面的严重种族不平等。随着英国准备退出欧盟，保守的政治言论激起了复兴的英国民族主义，社会正义和种族认同的代表问题日益突出。该项目将通过结合记忆研究、后殖民研究和临界种族理论(CRT)的认识论框架来研究这些问题。这三个领域在对主导的社会、文化和政治文本提供修正性批评方面有一个共同的基本核心：每个学科都考虑公共话语如何形成社会身份。然而，这些领域之间的跨学科融合面临着形成其调查的特定国家背景所带来的挑战。在英国，世界大战和大屠杀的记忆掩盖了殖民记忆(斯科菲尔德，2013；皮尔斯，2014)。本论文将面临这些挑战。该项目以记忆工作对社会文化遗址和文本的挖掘为基础，将其作为民族自决的关键指标(阿斯曼，2010；哈尔布瓦克斯，1992；诺拉，1989)，该项目将通过当代纪念实践来探索英国与殖民历史的关系。尽管后殖民研究和记忆研究作为国际学科具有很强的资历，但CRT在很大程度上是针对美国民权法律中对自由假设的种族意识批评而产生的(克伦肖等人)。Al，1995；Warmington，2012)。在此基础上，英国的CRT由于其自身的国家背景而面临着挣扎(Chakrabarty et.Al，2012)。现有的关于后殖民记忆的学术研究为论文考虑殖民遗产、种族从属以及欧洲战争和殖民否认之间的相互联系提供了有用的范式(Craps，2013；Rothberg，2009)。然而，目前对跨文化文学形式的关注使得关于英国案例的学术研究还没有得到发展。这些观点支撑了研究问题：英国和美国对黑人历史的文化记忆是如何影响每个国家CRT的发展的？多向记忆的范式如何在当代纪念实践中揭示英国的后殖民情绪？记忆研究和CRT之间的融合能否创造出对抗白人霸权文化实践的新范式？该项目的结构反映了每个问题。第一部分将探讨在史密森国家非裔美国人历史文化博物馆和布里克斯顿黑人文化档案馆(BCA)发表的纪念演讲，以考察种族从属关系产生的国家背景。第二部分将考虑英国资助的国家身份形成纪念活动的“多向性”--时间、政治和地理影响：2017年温德鲁什日在布里克斯顿揭幕的第一座非洲和加勒比服役人员纪念碑，2015年在内罗毕揭幕的茅茅纪念碑，以及威斯敏斯特宫将于2021年开放的新的大屠杀纪念碑。第三部分将通过新的口述历史，通过半结构化访谈，对隶属于BCA的活动家和布里克斯顿当地社区进行调查，探讨英国公共和私人的种族偏见经历之间的关系。因此，方法是比较的和跨学科的：该项目将文化研究的方法与CRT特有的方法结合起来，将产生关于英国背景下种族压迫构成的富有成效的对话。它将通过一个新的分析框架为英国的CRT学术做出贡献，也将进一步提高其作为国际学科的资格(Chakrabarty et。Al，2012)。

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).