Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Foster, Brian G

Titel

The Global and the Local: Black Britain and Globalization

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2010

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Since 1945 and the arrival of the Windrush Generation in 1948, Britain has become a global "container" and the dissolution of Empire has produced new internal subject populations. These subject populations were initially constructed abroad by the former Empire to sustain its existence and further its imperial strategies. Concerns related to force, laws, and the economy brought that Empire largely to an end with the result that former imperial subjects were incorporated into Britain through the process of immigration as a result of labour shortages. This has made for an uneasy relation that merges the global, imperial nature of the Empire and the local enterprise of sustaining a nation and building ideologically sound domestic institutions. Britain has therefore become an unstable state due to its transition from Empire abroad to the internal policing of its former imperial subjects and their offspring in Britain itself and this has resulted in a transformation of Britain's "traditional" notion of itself. In this dissertation, I propose an approach to this transition that continually focuses on particularity and lived experiences and therefore problematizes and expands previous definitions and uses of the term and concept "postcolonial" inside and outside of the academy. By relying on ethnographic and historical accounts as well as theoretical approaches to both postcolonialism and globalization, I concentrate on the local in the form of the black British individual (particularly my own father who traveled from Barbados to London in the 1950s), the transformations that London's working class neighborhoods experienced as a result of the black British presence, and the structure of the family within the context of my own black British family's experiences. Through the emphasis on the local and the familial, I ultimately argue that the imperial project's efforts to subjugate colonial populations for profit and privilege have been relocated to Britain itself, that these subject populations continue to resist the imperial apparatus within Britain, and that the experience of "postcoloniality" as a lived condition and as a globalized reality must be (re)situated to focus on the individual, the neighborhood, and the family.