Journal of Narrative Theory

"The Produce of More Than One Country' Race, Identity, and Discourse in Post-Windrush Britain David Ellis Is it necessarily true that colonial and postcolonial relationships are characterized by the power to name on the one hand, and the passive acceptance of naming on the other? The Prospero/Caliban archetype remains a powerful image in post colonial studies and continues to be a useful tool for exploring some of the psychological and material consequences of Imperialism . It does, however, run the risk of focussing the mind disproportionately upon Caliban's subjection and Prospero's authority. In part, this rather unilateral arrangement can be traced back to the work of two of the pioneering figures of post-colonial theory, Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon explores the traumatic psychological effects of colonialism upon the colonized. Cast as the permanently inferior Other of their white imperial masters, the colonized subjects of Empire internalize the values of colonial discourse to the detriment of their own self-image and identity. In Ngugi's terms, "decolonising the mind," becomes an essential act of resistance to, and recovery from, the experience of empire.1 Edward Said's seminal text, Orientalism (1978), adopts a different perspective . Focussing instead upon the colonizers, he identifies a number of different strategies which produce and define the colonized through impeJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 31.2 (Summer 2001): 214-232. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. "The Produce of More Than One Country" 215 rial discourses as a justification for their continued exploitation and oppression . For Said, Orientalism may be defined as, "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it" (3). More recent scholarship—most famously the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—has both responded to and extended this work by exploring ways in which the apparently stable binarism of colonizer/colonized might be reassessed. Building upon the poststructuralist insights of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, they have sought a dialogic potential for resistance and subversion within the apparently monologic discourse of empire. For the most part, such work has been focussed upon the revision and recovery of imperial texts. This paper, however seeks to extend the insights of these theories to the postimperial concerns of the establishment of multi-cultural Britain in the period after the Second World War: a shift in focus from the "colonial encounters " acted out in the age of empire, to the post-colonial encounters experienced at the metropolitan center. At first sight, such an encounter would seem to conform to postcolonialism 's paradigmatic relationship. Britain's ideological self-image as a benevolent and civilizing power had been reaffirmed by a victory over Fascism, while those individuals who began arriving in Britain during this period seeking work were about to undergo the enforced ontological transformation from British subject to foreign immigrant. The imperial exchange which had been fixed along lines of stability, unity and history on the one side, and subjectivity, disinheritance and rootlessness on the other, seemed ready for a further endorsement. However, by employing some of the insights afforded by Homi Bhabha's analysis of the colonial relationship , it is possible to recognize considerable uncertainty and slippage in the discourses surrounding this new encounter. First, though, some founding propositions. Britain has, of course, always been a multicultural society, but the interest here is principally with the period during which the subjects of Empire began to form a substantial and permanent part of the British population . This period began with the docking of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 with 492 returning ex-service personnel from the Caribbean. As Peter Fryer notes, it was an auspicious beginning: "To the London Evening 216 JNT Standard some of the Empire Windrush passengers . . . were making a return to 'the Motherland', and its account of their arrival was headlined: 'WELCOME HOME'. Officialdom, at both government and local levels, moved swiftly to make the Jamaicans feel welcome and find them accommodation and jobs" (372). Beyond this initial attempt to integrate...