"There'll Always Be an England": Representations Of
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"There'll Always Be an England": Representations of Colonial Wars and Immigration, 1948- 1968 Author(s): Wendy Webster Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, At Home in the Empire (Oct., 2001), pp. 557-584 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The North American Conference on British Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070747 . Accessed: 20/03/2012 18:58 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and The North American Conference on British Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of British Studies. http://www.jstor.org "There'll Always Be an England": Representationsof Colonial Wars and Immigration,1948-1968 Wendy Webster "In Malaya,"the Daily Mail noted in 1953, "threeand a half years of dangerhave given the planterstime to converttheir previously pleas- ant homes into miniaturefortresses, with sandbagparapets, wire entan- glements, and searchlights." The image of the home as fortressand a juxtapositionof the domestic with menace and terrorwere central to British media representationsof colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoireof imagerydeployed in the Daily Mail for the "miniaturefortress" in Malayawas extendedto Kenya,where the news- papernoted wire over domesticwindows, guns beside wine glasses, the charminghostess in her black silk dress with "an automaticpistol hang- ing at her hip." Such images of English domesticitythreatened by an alien other were also centralto immigrationdiscourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representationsof the empireand its legacy-resistance to colonial rule in empireand "immigrants"in the metropolis-increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries. Colonialwars of the late 1940s and 1950s have receivedlittle atten- tion in literatureson nationalidentity in early postwarBritain, but the articulationof racial differencethrough immigration discourse, and its significancein redefiningthe postimperialBritish national community WENDY WEBSTER is seniorlecturer in women'shistory in the Departmentof Histori- cal and CriticalStudies, University of CentralLancashire, Preston, United Kingdom. This article is part of a largerproject that explores the impact of loss of imperialpower on narrativesof Britishnessand Englishness.I am very indebtedto Mike Paris, without whose generoussharing of knowledgeand ideas on film researchI could not have written this piece. I would also like to thankJohn Walton and the two anonymousreaders for the Journalof British Studiesfor their valuablecomments. l Daily Mail (26 January1953). Journal of British Studies40 (October2001): 557-584 ? 2001 by The North AmericanConference on British Studies. All rights reserved.0021-9371/2001/4004-0005$02.00 557 558 WEBSTER has been widely recognized.2 As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging. Waters explores the race relations literature of this period to review the ways in which the idea of a "little England" was used against a black migrant "other."3 The myth of "little England," as he notes, can be traced back to the Edwardian period, when it was often used as an anti- imperial image. It was in the context of anxieties about national weak- ness, provoked by the Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902), that G. K. Chester- ton, in a symposium of papers by the Patriots' Club, advocated a return to "our ancient interest in England" as opposed to "our quite moder and quite frivolous interest in everywhere else," in tracing the "error in our recent South African politics."4 As Alison Light's work has shown, the imagery of "little England" was developed in the interwar period, when national identity was increasingly domesticated, emphasiz- ing hearth, home, and herbaceous border.5 After 1945, Waters argues, this version of nation was reworked against the migrant other-"an other perceived as a 'stranger' to those customs and conventions taken to be at the heart of Britishness itself."6 Bill Schwarz's work also explores what he calls a "re-racialization" of England in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but his focus is on the impact of decolonization on the metropolis and, in reviewing the history of white settler communities in empire, he is concerned to trace a range of connections between empire and "home."7 One connection is what he describes as "a battle between two irreconcilable Englands," exem- plified most starkly by Ian Smith's unilateral declaration of independence 2 See esp. Paul Gilroy, "There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack": The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London, 1987); Bill Schwarz, "'The Only White Man in There':The Re-racialisationof England, 1956-1968," Race and Class 38 (1996): 65- 78; Chris Waters, "'Dark Strangers'in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963," Journal of British Studies 36 (1997): 207-38; Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, "Race" and National Identity, 1945-64 (London, 1998). 3 Waters, "'Dark Strangers'in Our Midst,'" p. 208. 4 Quoted in Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge,1981), p. 60. 5 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars(London, 1991). 6Waters, "'Dark Strangers'in Our Midst,'" p. 208. 7 Bill Schwarz," 'The Only White Man in There,'" "Black Metropolis,White En- gland," in Moder Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea (London,1996), pp. 182-207, and "Reveriesof Race: The Closing of the Imperial Moment," in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964, ed. Becky Conekin,Frank Mort, and Chris Waters(London, 1999), pp. 189-207. COLONIALWARS AND IMMIGRATION 559 in Rhodesia in 1965. But another is the convergence of the language of white settler communities in empire and white opponents of black immigration in the metropolis, as both identified themselves as belea- guered, vulnerable, and embattled: "With immigration, the colonial fron- tier came 'home.' When this happened, the language of the colonies was reworked and came with it ... two inter-related sentiments slowly co- hered, unevenly and partially. First, whites were coming to imagine themselves as historic victims; and second-commensurably-blacks were believed to be acquiring a status of supremacy."8 While literatures on national identity have focused on questions of race, literatures on gender and sexuality have noted the pervasive anxi- eties about white masculinity in this period. Such anxieties manifested themselves in various forms. A preoccupation with the new "home- centered" working-class man expressed concern that he was becoming apolitical, with declining participation in public life of all kinds, whether in trade unions or public houses. The intense homophobia of the 1950s saw a rash of criminal prosecutions of gay men, some of them exten- sively publicized. A key anxiety about black migrants in Britain con- cerned "miscegenation"-a notion that was highly gendered, focusing on fears that black men were stealing "our women."9 Work on cultural representations of gender in film and drama has analyzed the ways in which such anxieties were addressed through a misogynistic discourse that showed white women emasculating men.?1 However, the connections between such anxieties and national identity have rarely been explored.1 The notion that loss of imperial power had any impact on the me- tropolis has generally gone unrecognized, with the conventional histori- ography of decolonization presenting-in Bill Schwarz's memorable phrase-"a stunning lack of curiosity" in this area.12If Gayatri Spivak's 8 Schwarz, "'The Only White Man in There,'" p. 73. 9Lynn Segal, "Look Back in Anger: Men in the Fifties," in Male Order: Un- wrappingMasculinity, ed. Rowena Chapmanand JonathanRutherford, (London, 1988), pp. 68-96; Alan Sinfield, Literature,Politics and Culturein Postwar Britain (Oxford, 1989);Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A FeministPerspective on the SexualRevolution (Lon- don, 1990); Chris Waters, "Disordersof the Mind, Disordersof the Body Social: Peter Wildebloodand the Makingof the Modem Homosexual,"in Momentsof Modernity,ed. Conekin,Mort, and Waters,pp. 134-51. 0John Hill, "Working-ClassRealism and Sexual Reaction:Some Theses on the British 'New Wave,'" in British CinemaHistory, ed. James Curranand Vincent Porter (London, 1983) pp. 303-11, and Sex, Class and Realism:British Cinema, 1956-1963 (London, 1986); MichelineWandor, Look Back in Gender:Sexuality and the Family in Post-warBritish Drama (London,1987); Terry Lovell, "Landscapesand Storiesin 1960s British Realism," Screen 31 (1990): 357-76. 1But see RichardDyer, White(London, 1997), esp. pp. 184-206; Webster,Imagin- ing Home. 12Schwarz, "'The Only White Man in There,'" p.