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Celestine Edwards’s shoulders but also upon those of Dadabhai Naoroji, and therefore upon those of Cobden, Bright and even Fox Bourne. Since anti-imperial London contained more than one anti-imperialism, so too did the Pan-African conference. The Bishop of London, Mandel Creighton, who delivered the opening address, spoke in the tones of the Aborigines Protection Society, of which, not coincidentally, he was a member. The conference was worthy, he said, because Britons ‘must look forward in their dealings with other races
– closely associated with Gaullism – was reformulated. Accordingly, we do not only need to study Biafra to help us construct genealogies of the present, the origin of something new. Many of the concepts that contemporaries used to understand the conflict were already around, such as self-determination or genocide. But the pro-Biafran campaign also established something new: Gaullists and disillusioned post-May leftists not interested in an anti-imperial revolution – which was
Stirring language and appeals to collective action were integral to the battles fought to defend empires and to destroy them. These wars of words used rhetoric to make their case. This book explores the arguments fought over empire in a wide variety of geographic, political, social and cultural contexts. Essays range from imperialism in the early 1900s, to the rhetorical battles surrounding European decolonization in the late twentieth century. Rhetoric is one of the weapons of war. Conquest was humiliating for Afrikaners but they regained a degree of sovereignty, with the granting of responsible government to the new colonies in 1907 and independence with the Act of Union of 1910. Liberal rhetoric on the Transvaal Crisis was thus neither an isolated debate nor simply the projection of existing political concerns onto an episode of imperial emergency. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's principles of intervention in response to crimes against civilization, constituted a second corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The rhetorical use of anti-imperial demonology was useful in building support for New Deal legislation. The book argues that rhetoric set out to portray the events at Mers el-Kebir within a culturally motivated framework, drawing on socially accepted 'truths' such as historic greatness and broad themes of hope. Now, over 175 years of monarchical presence in New Zealand the loyalty may be in question, devotion scoffed, the sycophantic language more demure and colloquialized, the medium of expression revolutionized and deformalized, but still the rhetoric of the realm remains in New Zealand.
This book excavates forgotten histories of solidarity which were vital to radical political imaginaries during the ‘long sixties’. It decentres the conventional Western focus of this critical historical moment by foregrounding transnational solidarity with, and across, anticolonial and anti-imperialist liberation struggles. It traces the ways in which solidarity was conceived, imagined and enacted in the border-crossings – of nation, race and class identifications – of grassroots activists.
Exiled revolutionaries in Uruguay, postcolonial migrants in Britain, and Greek communist refugees in East Germany campaigned for their respective causes from afar while identifying and linking up with liberation struggles in Vietnam and the Gulf and with civil rights movements elsewhere. Meanwhile, Arab migrants in France, Pakistani volunteers and Iraqi artists found a myriad of ways to express solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Neglected archives also reveal Tricontinental Cuban-based genealogies of artistic militancy, as well as stories of anticolonial activist networks and meetings in North America, Italy, the Netherlands and Sudan, forging connections with those freedom fighters attempting to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule in Africa. These entwined routes of the 1960s chart a complex map of transnational political recognition and radical interconnections.
Bringing together original research with contributions from veteran activists and artists, this interdisciplinary volume explores how transnational solidarity was expressed in and carried through the itineraries of migrants and revolutionaries, film and print cultures, art and sport, political campaigns and armed struggle. It presents a novel perspective on radical politics of the global sixties which remains crucial to understanding anti-racist solidarity today.
, and how historians can approach popular understandings of the politics of empire during this period through newspaper cartoons. The period immediately after the Second World War was a time of challenge and change for Britain, and this is as true for the empire as it is for the metropole. The post-war period is often perceived as a time of steady and irresistible decline in British imperial power, helped along by Labour's supposed anti-imperial nature; marked by the independence of India and the withdrawal from Palestine
European genres. Reportedly, Muslim students remained reluctant to break the injunction on depicting human figures, and art schools struggled to attract locals as a result: as late as 1934 only 15 percent of those at the Technical Art School in Samarkand were listed as “nationals,” that is, non-European. 48 Many artists and critics saw no contradiction between the anti-imperial rhetoric of nationalities policy and their paternalistic promotion of European traditions, since they considered figurativity to be inherently modern
Focusing on the histories of the New Era Fellowship (founded in South Africa in 1937), the Current Affairs Group (founded in Southern Rhodesia in 1938) and the Left Book Club in Jamaica (founded in Jamaica in 1938), this chapter maps a triangular network of circulation of socialist ideas created between the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. In particular, it looks at the transnational activities of London’s Left Book Club (LBC) between 1935 and 1947, when it founded more than fifteen groups around the globe, which distributed the material produced by the LBC. In addition to functioning as centres for the diffusion of Marxist, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial ideas, largely forming local nationalisms, those circles acted as centres of congregation and education. The Current Affairs Group, for example, was founded under influence of Victor Gollancz to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Along with the South African Communist newspaper the Guardian, the Current Affairs Group was responsible for disseminating socialist ideas among the black segregated population. The chapter argues that transnational networks sewn by the LBC, which connected those groups, favoured the creation of a global circuit which helped non-European intellectuals to act as carriers of anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-racist and nationalist ideas.
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
Newspapers, magazines and pamphlets have always been central, almost sacred, forms of communication within Irish republican political culture. While social media is becoming the primary ideological battleground in many democracies, Irish republicanism steadfastly expresses itself in the traditional forms of activist journalism.
Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters is a long-term analysis of the development of Irish republican activist media since 1998 and the tumultuous years following the end of the Troubles. It is the first in-depth analysis of the newspapers, magazines and online spaces in which the differing strands of Irish republicanism developed and were articulated during a period where schism and dissent defined a return to violence.
Based on an analysis of Irish republican media outlets as well as interviews with the key activists that produced them, this book provides a compelling long-term snapshot of a political ideology in transition. It reveals how Irish Republicanism was moulded by the twin forces of the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the violent internal ideological schism that threatened a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the Troubles.
This book is vital for those studying Irish politics and those interestedin activism as it provides new insights into the role that modern activist media forms have played in the ideological development of a 200-year-old political tradition.
Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.