BECOMING MODERN RACIALIZED SUBJECTS

Abstract

This essay is a close engagement with the work of Stuart Hall which has been central to the project of unraveling the complexities of difference, divisions in history, consciousness and humanity, embedded in the geo-political oppositions of colonial center and colonized margin, home and abroad, and metropole and periphery. Hall has exposed the temporal enigma that haunts the relation between colonial and post-colonial subject formation. In response, the essay focuses on the geo-politics rather than the linear temporality of encounters in an examination of the sources of tension, contention and anxiety that arise as racialized subjects are brought into being through narration in examples drawn from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and post-colonial Caribbean novelists. The essay concludes by positing an alternative narrative for the emergence of the modern racialized state in Britain, one that has its origins in official responses to the presence of black American troops and West Indian civilian and Royal Air Force (RAF) personnel on British soil during World War II, rather than to the Caribbean migrants who arrived on the Empire Windrush in 1948.

Keywords:

• British Empire
• cultural identities
• diaspora
• Englishness
• Olaudah Equiano
• Stuart Hall

Notes

1 This emerging racial state provides the context for my current work in progress, Child of Empire.

2 All references will be to the Norton edition edited by Werner Sollers.

3 Caretta points out that in Equiano's first years of life he is in a non-literate society and it is these years of life that are in doubt. Once he is in a literate society, and by that Caretta means a society with institutions that keep written records, like that of the Royal Navy, The Interesting Narrative, he declares, is ‘remarkably consistent with the historical record’ (2005, p. xvi).

4 See the very rich and interesting account of the complex, contradictory and multiple nature of Equiano's affiliations in relation to his own slave trading and political involvement in the scheme to export the poverty stricken black residents of London to Sierra Leone in Srinivas Aravamundan (1999, pp. 233–288).

5 ‘The multitude is composed of a set of singularities – and by singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains different.’

6 These are some of the most obvious choices but there are many, many more, among them: Webster (1998), Owusu (2000), Procter (2000) and Alibhai-Brown (2001). See also the BBC2 television production Windrush.

7 Child of Empire returns to the inter-war years in order to juxtapose the stories of growing up in the colonial periphery and the imperial heartland, a story I will not go into here.

8 Laura Tabili argues that: ‘In the 1920s and 1930s racial categories and racial subordination were reconstituted on British soil.’

9 See also the reproduction of documents containing these discussions in Hachey (1974).

10 This is one of the few sources I have found to discuss how attitudes toward ‘race’ during the war are shaped both in relation to the Americans and Britain's colonial policy. When Viscount Cranborne, for the Colonial Office opposed the dissemination of the War Office's ‘Notes on Relations with Coloured Troops’ and resisted attempts ‘to bend to American pressure’ Rich argues that ‘Policy on racial discrimination and the preservation of British colonial policy … were … for Cranbourne, crucially linked, and for the first time in British government policy there was exhibited a far-reaching understanding of the inter-relationship between race and wider public policy in both Britain and the colonial empire’ (1990, pp. 151, 153).

11 This long and complex story forms a substantial section of my current work-in-progress, Child of Empire.