Abstract: | 'Colonization through a process of affection', wrote the London-based Barbadian novelist George Lamming in 1960, was 'the worst form of colonization'. Lamming's London was marked by the violent currents of racism - some seen, many disavowed. But the operations of race, the putting-in-place of its hierarchies, the destructions of the self that its logics entailed, exceeded only expressions of violence and hatred. It was in 'affection', too, that colonialism's racial visions operated. It was not only among the illiberals, but among the liberals, that colonization continued its hold on metropolitan culture. 'Colonized by Humanity' is a study of racial liberalism at the end of empire. It uncovers the projects to cultivate racial integration developed in the two decades between the arrival of the Empire Windrush and the passage of the first Race Relations Act. |
