CALL FOR PAPERS

Visual Culture in Britain at the End of Empire

Edited by Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy
Ashgate Publishing Ltd

NOTE:
The book has already been commissioned, but we are looking for a maximum of
three more essays on the subject.  We would be particularly interested in
essays which explored:
the representation of Palestine; the visual presence of colonial resistance
struggles in Britain; the relationship between images of black people’s
resistance to British racism and colonialism; essays which explored
architecture.

Deadline for the submission of abstracts: 31 November 2003

Deadline for completed articles: March 2004

Please send abstracts via email to:
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OUTLINE

This book seeks to examine the cultural fallout from the end of Empire
across a range of visual media from fine art to film.  Through visual
representations it will show how the retreat from Empire framed the
production of British culture and identities in the post-war period.  Given
the importance of imperial culture within British society prior to the
Second World War, the retreat from Empire had a profound effect on the
British cultural field.   Yet despite the recent emergence of the field of
post-colonial studies, there has been relatively little research on the
impact of the process of decolonisation upon British culture during the
immediate post-war period.

The book seeks to avoid the tendency within existing literature on twentieth
century British cultural history to discuss issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity
prior to the 1940s in terms of the colonial encounter and the period after
the Second World War in terms of immigration. This division of experience
into a before and and after immigration has tended to ignore the
complexities of the period between the late 1940s and the 1960s, during
which immigration was just one element of a set of shifts in Britain’s
relationship to the rest of the world.  In contrast, this book will discuss
the ways in which the tangled relationships between the political decline of
the British Empire and the shift to neo-colonial structures and  the
immigration from the Empire and emerging commonwealth impacted on visual
constructs of ‘race’, ethnicity and nation.  Different essays will position
changing representations triggered by immigration alongside the faultlines
generated in the British imaginary by the loss of the colonies.

Although taking the end of formal Empire to define a process, which has
continued since the mid-twentieth  century, the book will be primarily
(although not exclusively) focused on the 1950s and 1960s.  The book will
define decolonisation as a process of economic, political and cultural
struggle, both between the imperial centre and the colonies, and within
Britain itself.  Thus the 1950s and 1960s will be understood not as a period
defined by a smooth transition from an imperial to a post-imperial society,
but as a moment during which British political and economic interests were
contested by anti-colonial and revolutionary politics, and in which the
apparent securities of British imperial culture were fractured, allowing for
the emergence of new cultural forms and identities.