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2 BEYOND A BOUNDARY: Constructing Anglo-Caribbean and Franco-Antillean Identity
- Indiana University Press
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81 Beyond a Boundary Constructing Anglo-Caribbean and Franco-Antillean Identity Reinventing Ethnicity Perhaps the most pressing issue raised in the myriad forms of representation adopted and adapted by the Anglo-Caribbean community is that of identity: Whose identity is it? Whose story is being told? Or, put another way, are we being confronted with narratives of Englishness or of Caribbeanness? Before attempting to respond to such questions, however, these two last categories oblige us to address the thorny implications of the role of ethnicity in constructions of national identity. The long-held view in certain circles that “Englishness” was a matter or a productof“history”and“belonging”logicallyimpliedaconnectionwith other, more problematic binaries: relations of inclusion and exclusion, of self and other, us and them, of homogeneity and heterogeneity. By such lights, these new arrivants, on whom the sun of the British Empire never set, would ultimately be seen as British, perhaps, but certainly not English; this latter concept was fixed and rooted in a cultural framework that took its innate whiteness–and, implicitly, its endogamous characteristics –as a historical given. As a result, a threatened infusion of black British belongers menaced mainstream perceptions of the sceptered isle and inaugurated a series of tensions and teleologies that operated on the assumption that those breaching the borders of the imagined community , being British by name but not perhaps by nature, would change its character forever. As Baker, Best, and Lindeborg put it, “‘Black’ thus makes ethnicity a temporal configuration, one that is made to appear always in tension with a fixed ‘Englishness’” (5). And indeed, it is the two 82 Creolizing the Metropole conundrum posed by the threatened conflation of “blackness” with “Englishness” that we must now consider. Following the introduction of increasingly large numbers of West Indians into the UK in the wake of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, the politics of identity became the key consideration not only of the arriving immigrants but of the already entrenched English as well. At stake for both parties were issues of belonging, of recognition, and of national identity; paradoxically, with the cusp of the post/colonial period not having yet ushered in strong feelings of island, or even of regional identity, most West Indian immigrants felt themselves to be British, and they could not fathom the weak-kneed acceptance or, in many cases, the outright hostility and rejection with which they were met. Subjected to an astonishing gamut of colonial influences, ranging from education to advertising to celebrating Empire Day to being encouraged to volunteer for military service in the First and Second World Wars, most West Indians had come to believe, as Tony Sewell puts it, that “everything that was good, beautiful, intelligent and decent was white and English. . . . In geography they learnt by heart the mountain ranges and rivers of Britain,theystudiedShakespeareandMiltonandweremadetodoLatin grammar; and at the end of the year they took exams set by the school boards of Oxford and Cambridge” (8). Through the critical conjoining of language, literature, and education, and their functioning through the geographical grid of the colonial system, the simple act of reading canonical authors–albeit as part of a scheduled school syllabus–meant that “pleasure became an instrument of assimilation,” as Robert Foster claims,“engagingtheimaginationinthesupportofacertainworldview. . . . The reading of such childhood literature . . . the sharing of certain texts bestowed a common adolescence on English and colonial schoolchildren ” (23). There were legal ramifications as well; even at the beginning of the century, if one could prove birth within the British Empire, one could claim full nationality rights in Britain. The British Nationality Act of 1948 extended these rights by conferring the status of British citizen on all Commonwealth subjects and recognizing their right to work and settle in the UK. Indeed, their passports literally documented their status as “citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies.” The new categoryofCitizenoftheUnitedKingdomandColonies(CUKC)engen- [54.205.238.173] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:11 GMT) Beyond a Boundary 83 dered by the Act of 1948 consisted of all those British subjects who had a close relationship (either through birth or descent) with the United Kingdom and its remaining colonies. Thus the simple fact of birth in the UK or a British colony sufficed for the acquisition of the status of British subject. But the Caribbean migrants taking advantage of these assumptions of equality had not counted on the latent perceptions of otherness lurking in the motherland. As a result of these complex processes, while the West Indian community in...