Twentieth Century British History最新文献

This article dwells in the archive documenting the existence of David Oluwale, a Nigerian-born British citizen whose life is captured historically by way of his encounters with the state. Working within and against the dynamics of violation, racialization, and dispossession structuring his archival presence, this article looks to the visual and sonic registers of an archive of Black dispossession to excavate histories of anti-Black state violence in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. Likewise, it considers the extent to which an archive steeped in Black dispossession might offer possibilities for imagining Black emotive lives and constructing histories of Black sentience and affect even as they are produced in the context of racialized violence and duress.

How might historians narrate Britain's past if we centre imperial racial formation and its contestations? The thirtieth anniversary of Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation provided an opportunity for a new generation of scholars to consider the frameworks of race in British history. In 1987, Gilroy challenged Marxist approaches that treated race as secondary to or even a mechanistic expression of class inequality. He showed that the failure to account for race and empire positioned racialized subjects as perpetual outsiders. Taking up Gilroy's analysis as a point of departure, this thematic issue brings together analyses of the state, institutions, and individuals to propose new periodizations, geographies, and methodologies for understanding twentieth-century British history. In this introduction, Marc Matera, Radhika Natarajan, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Camilla Schofield, and Rob Waters describe the five-year conversation that led to this thematic issue, introduce their respective essays, and explain why race must be understood not as a descriptive category but as an analytical framework for understanding Britain's past.

Between 1962 and 1965, a broad definition of dependence allowed for the migration of Commonwealth Citizens to join working family members in Britain. This article investigates how the Home Office targeted male dependent youth as a category that could reduce unwanted immigration from the Commonwealth, particularly South Asia. Home Office officials obscured the stories of dependent migrants, constructed the figure of the 'bogus child', and denigrated male familial connections, which resulted in the denial of family reunion. Colonial assumptions about the mendacity of South Asians and the illegibility of South Asian family forms shaped British policy. The 1965 White Paper and the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act foreclosed the possibility of a broad definition of family and consolidated the legitimacy of the cisheterosexual family. Home Office discussions dovetailed with an emergent common sense circulated in newspapers and public debate about the illegitimacy of the South Asian family in Britain. This article interrogates the racist reasoning of the Home Office and this emergent common sense not only to show how immigration policy generates racialization but also to reveal the specificity of South Asian racialization in the post-imperial social formation.

'Race relations' became the most common way of conceptualizing the 'integration' of Commonwealth migrants and various obstacles to it in post-war Britain. However, interest in race relations did not centre initially on Afro-Caribbeans and other non-white migrants to metropolitan Britain as is commonly assumed. Before the 1960s, efforts to study and manage them centred primarily on British settler colonies in Africa. This article demonstrates how colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies directed towards race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of African liberation movements and to shape post-colonial futures with neoliberal solutions.

While ongoing discrimination in jobs, welfare, and housing in 1970s England belied the social democratic promise of 'equality of opportunity' and the much-touted British value of 'fair play', racism at the door of the working men's club told a different story. For reactionaries and liberals alike, it spoke to the uncertain future of working-class politics in late industrial England. This article shows how the legal and political controversies surrounding whites-only working men's clubs contribute to our understanding of the 'white working class' as a political subject in British public life. Even more, it reveals how-among club members-whiteness came to be invested with feelings of intimacy, kinship, respectability, and independence.

This article reads late-twentieth-century race relations research projects from the perspectives of the black and brown Britons who were the targets of research. The analysis focuses on contestations around issues of epistemic authority and resource allocation in the relationship between black citizens and the state in the post-war decades, helping us to understand why so many black citizens saw the state and its programmes of social research not as enabling or providing but surveilling and disempowering them. Relative to the dominant reading among historians of late-twentieth-century Britain of the rise of social research as a democratic story, in which 'ordinary' voices were listened to and given weight in the development of social policy, the study of race relations research in this article reveals a far less consensual, less democratic relationship between state-sponsored research institutions and the black and brown people who became targets of race-relations research projects. It highlights the ubiquity of challenges or evasions to those research institutions and their claims to epistemic authority, and it shows how these researches were indicted as distractions, attempts at pacification, and misuses of funds. Reading the social encounters of 'race relations' research as moments in which state power and state-sanctioned racial knowledge were engaged and contested reveals the steady process by which the foundations of an unpopular and ineffective 'race relations industry' were cast into doubt, or consent for it refused.

The atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, was one of the most notorious figures of the early Cold War. The story of his espionage and the impact it had has been the subject of extensive historical research. This article provides a new angle on the Fuchs case by examining the repercussions of his actions on his friends, colleagues, and the wider scientific community in Britain that have previously been overlooked. It argues that the subsequent fall-out led several atomic scientists to have their own loyalties questioned and be subjected to extensive and sustained surveillance. As the article will show, the inevitable era of suspicion that the Fuchs case ushered in did damage to the reputations, careers, and prospects of certain scientists. By examining the repercussions, the article helps to provide a first insight into the experience of some British scientists during the early years of the Cold War.

This article illuminates the dynamics of two of the most significant yet neglected youth subcultures of the late twentieth century: football's casual culture and the acid house scene. Through the lens of two influential fanzines, Liverpool's The End and London's Boy's Own I make a series of arguments about the relationship between 'popular individualism', emotion, and working-class communities. I argue that while conceptualizing the fanzines as 'emotional communities' can yield important insights about the role of feelings such as nostalgia in bonding people together, gendered sensibilities and satirical frameworks need to be taken into account in order to fully understand the subcultural affinities that the fanzines engendered. The framework of 'popular individualism' on the other hand can help to illuminate the tensions between individualism and collective belonging at a number of levels which the article discusses. The article concludes by noting that the analysis of these neglected subcultures offers fruitful ways of reconceptualizing community and belonging in a period when traditional forms of working-class organization were in decline.