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British Caribbean residents generally to chart their own destinies. 43 Arguments such as this were to be replayed throughout the rest of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, as brown, black and indeed white creolised West Indians claimed their rights to citizenship, self-government and nationhood. Island
. Royal tourists, colonial subjects and the making of a British world posits that colonial actors, from African and South Asian intellectuals to the neo-Britons of settlement colonies, were legitimate contributors to British culture. Against the telelogy of emerging nationhood in which the stories of both the colonies of settlement (e.g. New Zealand and Australia) and the ‘dependent’ empire (e
. Following the recommendations of the Durham Report, the decades from the 1830s to 1910 saw the gradual extension to the settlers first of representative government, then of responsible government and, finally, after the colonies had travelled their separate roads to nationhood, of greater independence as British Dominions. This shift in power from central to more localised control by European systems of law and government was
Canada nationally should, as the years go on, reap a rich harvest in sound patriotic citizenship’. 16 Looking to the future through investing in children was a strong postwar concern across Canada, as it was in other countries whose soldiers had fought in the war and which were keen to rebuild and mould their sense of nationhood. The educational memorial was ‘undertaken with a view to instilling an
origin in the drama of nascent nationhood, and that pride encompasses not only the creativeness, uniqueness and originality of West Indian mime, song and dance – but is the genesis of the nation itself.’ 51 ‘The drama of nascent nationhood’ was clearly active in Claudia Jones’s imagination. But her commitments to the West Indies were mediated through an almost lifelong absence. She had
extraordinary library, which was used by both his son and by James. It is very likely that this contained classic writings of black intellectuals. James certainly recalls Padmore reading DuBois and Garvey whilst he was still in Trinidad. Padmore’s insistence that his daughter be named after the early intellectual of black nationhood, Edward Blyden, is suggestive. But much of this is evidence cited
proved the ‘real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence’. The war epitomised the ‘blind brute forces of tigerish tribalism which remain at the core of civilized society’. 10 But out of that catastrophe came the second event that fired McKay. This was the Russian Revolution. ‘Holy’ Russia, as he
everyone in the West Indies has come, or their ancestors have come, from elsewhere. No one is wholly at home. Even the indigenous Caribs, on their poverty-stricken reservations, have been encircled and displaced, their home made unhomely. In the West Indies there was nothing comparable to the insistent ideological construction of nationhood that formed the United States, and turned its immigrants into a
: Présence africaine and the politics of otherness, 1947–1987 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 20 Leopold Senghor, ‘Nationhood: report on the doctrine and program of the Party of African Federation’, in his On African Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 49
claims to nationhood did not depend on possession of a distinct ‘native’ culture or language. On all these grounds, his seeming indifference to them is readily understandable. In his most influential works, James set out to assail and demolish views of Britain’s history – above all its imperial history – which he regarded as myths. The legend to be destroyed was the idea that