Biopolitical Bodies: The Unhousing of the Colonial Archive

As a number of commentators have pointed out, a widespread resurgence in "imperial nostalgia" accompanied the Brexit referendum of June 2016, recasting Britain's vote to leave the European Union as an opportunity to return to a mythical moment of supposed British imperial greatness and, somewhat paradoxically, national sovereignty.¹ The product of a postcolonial melancholia, as Paul Gilroy describes it in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, such nostalgia is rooted in Britain's abnegation of the fundamental role it played in the violent formation of the modern world-system, an archival erasure that in turn legitimizes its current global posturing.²

Meanwhile, nostalgic imperial narratives have long been embedded in a widely consumed, highly profitable, and deeply conservative mainstream cultural landscape, but this too appears to have resurfaced with increased vigor in recent years. Consider films such as Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), or more especially Joe Wright's Darkest Hour (2017). Both movies retell the story of Winston Churchill's catastrophic early World War II career, rebranding his patriotic idiocy and poor military strategizing as an admirable effort, against the odds, to persuade his cautious colleagues to defend Britain's borders from invading Nazis—at the expense of its mostly working class, often multicultural citizenry. That Churchill's infamous "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" speech has been the lazy endgame of these British movies, two of 2017's highest grossing box office hits, is thus unsurprising. These words reproduce an ongoing myth that Britain's national "independence"—a word continually brandished by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader and proBrexit spokesperson Nigel Farage—needs to be salvaged, fought for, and protected at all costs.

Darkest Hour's whitewashing of Churchill's imperial activity takes a particularly pernicious turn in its awkward attempts to incorporate a multicultural twist into its twenty-first-century rebranding of British resilience. In the film's climactic scene, the noble Churchill, who is commonly supposed to have commented that "the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with an average voter," condescends to solicit the opinion of a recently arrived Caribbean immigrant, who in the film is filled with admiration for the British prime minister—Churchill's interactions with this colonial subject contain no trace of the racist epithets for which he was historically notorious. The film here performs an accommodationist, reactionary form of multiculturalism that re-centers white, male privilege as not only a normative category, but also a benevolent force, now a well-worn routine for advocates of imperial nostalgia. Britain's violent imperial history is erased, but that erasure is doubly violent, as those who are otherwise condemned to silence confess their admiration for, and thus amplify the voices of, those who have always spoken the loudest. In Darkest Hour, a historical narrative advocating racial purity and national sovereignty is both thinly concealed by, and has its legitimacy bolstered through, a multicultural façade.

Britain's current nationalist resurgence, not to mention the mainstreaming of propagandist messages embedded in contemporary cultural performances, makes Steven Blevins's new book, Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past, imperative reading. Blevins launches two overarching challenges to the historical whitewashing of which Darkest Hour is emblematic. First, he provides a new critical language—a series of amalgamated yet eloquent phrases, or as Blevins himself concedes, "my own modes of critical promiscuity" (9)—that emphasizes the longue durée of modern imperialism's racial and economic violence and its continuing reproduction in the present. By highlighting these continuities through terms such as human bio-cargo and unhousing the archive (the specificities of which I will return to below), Blevins counters the amnesiac underpinnings of imperial nostalgic practices and throws their violent effects into fuller relief.

Blevins's second challenge comes from his meticulous close readings of a range of black British cultural performances, from novels and creative nonfiction to films and installation art pieces. Living Cargo is broken down into three...