The afterlife of empire: Immigrants and the imagi(nation) in post-colonial Britain

Immigrants do not simply adapt to places, they also transform them. This dissertation explores the challenges, real and imagined, that the presence and actions of British Asians and Afro/Caribbeans represent to British national culture. In Birmingham, England's second city, these recent immigrants who are estimated to comprise a quarter of the city's population have transformed public life, and while remaining at the margins of the national imagination, challenge its secular (liberal) Christian values. The dissertation examines the reactions of respectable, liberal English natives to immigrant settlement in the local context of Springfield, Birmingham, and on the national stage.; Successive chapters scrutinize sites of conflict between the English and new immigrants and explore the historical imaginary of self and other that configure the contours of such confrontations. These include: local contests over public space, housing and multicultural education, as well as national level contests over immigration legislation, and arguments as to whether or not British blasphemy law should be extended to other religions or abolished, which followed the burning of The Satanic Verses in 1989 by British Muslims.; Drawing from fieldwork in Birmingham, from historical sources on colonial and post/colonial Asia and the Caribbean, and from popular media representations of Asian and Afro/Caribbean peoples and cultures in Britain, the dissertation traces continuities and disjunctures in constructions of local events and broader national and transnational movements. It traces how colonial and orientalist modes of representation of self and other, configure contemporary race politics and trouble the refiguration of post/imperial British national identity in non-obvious ways.; Here history constitutes a key analytic problematic in a revisionist attempt to anthropologize Western/British history. The concluding chapter of the dissertation argues that, if anthropology was the study of "people without history", Whig history constitutes a story of the British nation which was dialectically forged through successive encounters with Asian and Afro/Caribbean others in the same configuration of power and knowledge that structured and was in turn constituted in the colonial encounter. As such, British history is read as an ongoing dialectical and dialogical narrative of the nation.