Abstract
There is an urgency in the current political conjuncture for historians of Britain and empire to rethink ways of writing imperial histories. For British historians the urgency comes from the difficult questions which face British society about the meanings now attached to the nation. What identities are possible as members of that imagined community? What ethnicities? What future is there for Britain as a multi-ethnic society?1 For centuries white British identities, both male and female, have been constructed through sets of assumptions about imperial power in relation to racialised others. Those white identities are now in crisis, and are no longer possible in the same forms. Britain no longer has an empire; she is no longer the first industrial nation and forms of national sovereignty have shifted given the transfer of power to Brussels. Furthermore, the empire has ‘come home’, in the shape of those decolonised peoples from the Caribbean, from Asia and from Africa who have made their homes in Britain and whose children have been confronted by the difficulties of being black and British.2
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Endnotes
For the concept of nation as an ‘imagined community’ see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1983).
In the question of the difficult relation between black and British see Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black In the Union Jack, (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); Black Skins, White Masks, (London: Pluto Press, 1986).
Robert Young, White Mythologies. Writing History and the West, (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
Edward Said, Orientalism, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Francis Barker et al. (eds), The Politics of Theory, (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1983); ‘The Other Question’, Screen, 24, 6 (1983); ‘Of Mimicry and Man: the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, 28 (1984); ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, in Francis Barker et al. (eds), Europe and Its Others, (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985).
Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988); In Other Worlds, (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Lata Marri, ‘Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, (eds.), Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry, 12, 1 (1985), p. 253; and for a historical essay which makes use of this insight see Catherine Hall, ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains … to Africa’s Golden Sand: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in mid-nineteenth century England’, Gender and History, Special issue on ‘Gender, Nationalisms and National Identities’, Vol. 5, No. 2, (summer 1993).
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, Feminist Review, 30 (autumn 1988); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, (eds.), Third-World Women and the Politics of Feminism, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Toni Morrison, Beloved, (London: Picador, 1988).
Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua and Toni Cade Bambara (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back. Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1981).
For a longer account of this shift in perspective in the British context see Catherine Hall, ‘Feminism and Feminist History’ in White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History, (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).
For an analysis of the centrality of gender to English society in the nineteenth century see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850, (London and Chicago: Hutchinson and Chicago, 1987).
Mary Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society 1787–1834, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom. Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Robert Stewart, Religion and Society in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992).
For secondary sources on the free villages see Sidney Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co, 1974); Swithin Wilmot, ‘Baptist Missionaries and Jamaican Politics 1838–54’, paper presented at the 12th Conference of Caribbean Historians (April 1980); ‘The Peacemakers: Baptist Missionaries and Ex-Slaves in West Jamaica’, Jamaica Historical Review, Vol. 13, (1982); Alex Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain, (London: Christopher Helm, 1987); Hugh Paget, ‘The Free Village System in Jamaica’, Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1 (March 1964); George E. Cumper, ‘A Modern Jamaican Sugar Estate’, Social and Economic Studies, No. 3 (1954).
James Murcell Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State, (London: John Snow, 1843), pp. 430–31.
Edward Bean Underhill, The West Indies: Their Social and Religious Condition, (London: Jackson, Walford and Hodder, 1862), pp. 243, 295, 312, 315–16.
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© 1995 Department of History, U.W.I., Mona, Jamaica
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Hall, C. (1995). Gender Politics and Imperial Politics. In: Shepherd, V., Brereton, B., Bailey, B. (eds) Engendering History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07302-0_3
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