‘They Called Them Communists Then … What D'You Call ‘Em Now? … Insurgents?’. Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism

Abstract

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the colonial past provides material for contemporary actors' understanding of difference. The research from which the paper is drawn involved interview and ethnographic work in three largely white working-class estates in an English provincial city. For this paper we focus on ten life-history interviews with older participants who had spent some time abroad in the British military. Our analysis adopts a postcolonial framework because research participants' current constructions of an amorphous ‘Other’ (labelled variously as black people, immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers or Muslims) reveal strong continuities with discourses deployed by the same individuals to narrate their past experiences of living and working as either military expatriates or spouses during British colonial rule. Theoretically, the paper engages with the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In keeping with a postcolonial approach, we work against essentialised notions of identity based on ‘race’ or class. Although we establish continuity between white working-class military emigration in the past and contemporary racialised discourses, we argue that the latter are not class-specific, being as much the creations of the middle-class media and political elite.

Keywords:

• British Emigration
• Postcolonialism
• New Imperialism
• Immigration
• ‘Race’

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Meike Fechter, Katie Walsh and Kirat Randhawa for helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper; and to Tamsin Browning and Tania Edwards for transcribing the interviews. The research was funded by ESRC grant no. RES-148-25-0047.

Notes

1. An academic literature on British and other European expatriates/emigrants has, however, begun to emerge (see, for example, Bott 2004; Fechter 2005; King et al. 2000; O'Reilly 2000; Walsh 2006).

2. For a more detailed discussion of our research practice, see Rogaly and Taylor (2009: 28–33).

3. Participants' real names have not been used in this paper.

4. One participant moved to Norwich and to the estate after returning from military expatriate life.

5. Even though, as other authors have pointed out, French and British colonialism were in many ways different (see, for example, Young 2001).

6. Manifest in degrading treatment for those classified as ‘terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’ during incarceration in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

7. Thanks to Anne-Meike Fechter for bringing Cohen's work to our attention.