Imperialism, Race and Resistance marks an important new development in the study of British and imperial interwar history. Focusing on Britain, West Africa and South Africa, Imperialism, Race and Resistance charts the growth of anti-colonial resistance and opposition to racism in the prelude to the 'post-colonial' era. The complex nature of imperial power in explored, as well as its impact on the lives and struggles of black men and women in Africa and the African diaspora. Barbara Bush argues that tensions between white dreams of power and black dreams of freedom were seminal in transofrming Britain's relationship with Africa in an era bounded by global war and shaped by ideological conflict.
‘There is no socialism after liberation, socialism is the process through which liberation is won.’ Each of the essays in Communities of Resistance acts as a critical reaffirmation of socialist politics as the context for questions of race and resistance. The left itself is under scrutiny here—from a black perspective. A series of powerful interventions covers many of the issues which have confronted radical politics in the 1980s: inner-city uprisings, the demand for black sections in the Labour Party, local government anti-racism, the move to a common European market. This collection included incisive critiques of contemporary Marxism (‘All that Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of “New Times” ’), of post-colonial development, and of the Eurocentric assessment of imperialism.
In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their co
By exploring the dimensions of race, race relations and resistance, this book offers a new account of the British Empire's greatest failure and its most disturbing legacy. Using a wide range of published and archival sources, this study of racial discourse from 1870 to 1914 argues that race, then as now, was a contested territory within the metropolitan culture. Based on a wide range of published and archival sources, this book uncovers the conflicting opinions that characterised late Victorian and Edwardian discourse on the 'colour question'. It offers a revisionist account of race in science, and provides original studies of the invention of the language of race relations and of resistance to race-thinking led by radical abolitionists and persons of Asian and African descent living in the United Kingdom.
This incisive study reveals the fundamental, paradoxical weakness of colonialism and the enduring power of anticolonial resistance. Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise, especially when the agents of struggle are the colonized, the enslaved, the wretched of the earth. Anticolonial revolts and slave rebellions have often been described by those in power as “eruptions”—volcanic shocks to a system that does not, cannot, see them coming. In Anticolonial Eruptions, Geo Maher diagnoses a paradoxical weakness built right into the foundations of white supremacist power, a colonial blind spot that grows as domination seems more complete. Anticolonial Eruptions argues that the colonizer’s weakness is rooted in dehumanization. When the oppressed and excluded rise up in explosive rebellion, with the very human demands for life and liberation, the powerful are ill-prepared. This colonial blind spot is, ironically, self-imposed: the more oppressive and expansive the colonial power, the lesser-than-human the colonized are believed to be, the greater the opportunity for resistance. Maher calls this paradox the cunning of decolonization, an unwitting reversal of the balance of power between the oppressor and the oppressed. Where colonial power asserts itself as unshakable, total, and perpetual, a blind spot provides strategic cover for revolutionary possibility; where race or gender make the colonized invisible, they organize, unseen. Anticolonial Eruptions shows that this fundamental weakness of colonialism is not a bug, but a permanent feature of the system, providing grounds for optimism in a contemporary moment roiled by global struggles for liberation.
This book provides unique "insider" critical insights into the ever-growing field of Postcolonial Studies, from one of the field's original architects.
There is a rich intellectual history to the development of anti-colonial thought and practice. In discussing the politics of knowledge production, this collection borrows from and builds upon this intellectual traditional to offer understandings of the macro-political processes and structures of education delivery (e. g., social organization of knowledge, culture, pedagogy and resistant politics). The contributors raise key issues regarding the contestation of knowledge, as well as the role of cultural and social values in understanding the way power shapes everyday relations of politics and subjectivity. In reframing anti-colonial thought and practice, this book reclaims the power of critical, oppositional discourse and theory for educational transformation. Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance, includes some the most current theorizing around anti-colonial practice, written specifically for this collection. Each of the essays extends the terrain of the discussion, of what constitutes anti-colonialism. Among the many discursive highlights is the interrogation of the politics of embodied knowing, the theoretical distinctions and connections between anti-colonial thought and post-colonial theory, and the identification of the particular lessons of anti-colonial theory for critical educational practice. Essays explore such key issues as the challenge of articulating anti-colonial thought as an epistemology of the colonized, anchored in the indigenous sense of collective and common colonial consciousness; the conceptualization of power configurations embedded in ideas, cultures and histories of marginalized communities; the understanding of indigeneity as pedagogical practice; and the pursuit of agency, resistance and subjective politics through anti-colonial learning.
The fortress of Fashoda is on an obscure junction of the Nile, but from 1870 onwards, because of its strategic position and the rise of European colonialism, it became the subject of conflict between the rival Western powers of Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and Italy.
The riots that broke out in various British port cities in 1919 were a dramatic manifestation of a wave of global unrest that affected Britain, parts of its empire, continental Europe and North America during and in the wake of the First World War. During the riots, crowds of white working-class people targeted black workers, their families and black-owned businesses and property. One of the chief sources of violent confrontation in the run-down port areas was the ‘colour’ bar implemented by the sailors’ trades unions campaigning to keep black, Arab and Asian sailors off British ships in a time of increasing job competition. Black 1919 sets out the economic and social causes of the riots and their impact on Britain’s relationship with its empire and its colonial subjects. The riots are also considered within the wider context of rioting elsewhere on the fringes of the Atlantic world as black people came in increased numbers into urban and metropolitan settings where they competed with working-class white people for jobs and housing during and after the First World War. The book details the events of the port riots in Britain, with chapters devoted to assessing the motivations and make-up of the rioting crowds, examining police procedures during the riots, considering the court cases that followed, and looking at the longer-term consequences for the black British workers and their families. Black 1919 is a stark and timely reminder of the violent racist conflict that emerged after the First World War and the shockwaves that reverberated around the Empire.
