{"title":"The African Grounds of Race Relations in Britain.","authors":"Marc Matera","doi":"10.1093/tcbh/hwad037","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>'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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46051,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth Century British History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Twentieth Century British History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwad037","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
'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.
期刊介绍:
Twentieth Century British History covers the variety of British history in the twentieth century in all its aspects. It links the many different and specialized branches of historical scholarship with work in political science and related disciplines. The journal seeks to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, in order to foster the study of patterns of change and continuity across the twentieth century. The editors are committed to publishing work that examines the British experience within a comparative context, whether European or Anglo-American.