Abstract
This chapter is the first of two historical sociology chapters that use genealogy to historicize the meanings of freedom, Black British identity and Black womanhood presented in the previous chapters. As an ontology of the present, the aim of Chaps. 5 and 6 is to identify the conjunctures informing the changing temporalities of what we have identified as liberal-colonial governmentality, as it has targeted and sought to shape African-Caribbean women as both subjects of freedom and subjects of British liberal-colonial rule—that is, racial governmentality. These two chapters also reveal the double articulation of the colonial relation in which British ideas of freedom, race, gender and citizenship have been elaborated and reformed within a colonial circulation of power, interests and influence, in which the interests of the metropole and the colonies have been mutually dependent.
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Notes
- 1.
The discussions of this that follow will not address the intersectional politics of reproductive rights, support for the family through the taxation and welfare benefits system, and social policy discourses of ‘population’, which have informed public debates about immigration in Britain.
- 2.
The problems posed for Asian communities were often perceived to be caused by the excess of cultural difference and its impact on Asian migrants’ cultural adaptation and integration into British social and cultural norms.
- 3.
David Cameron’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, Saturday 5 February 2011. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference.
- 4.
We should note that Hindu and Muslim marriages were not given legal status in Trinidad law until 1945.
- 5.
Although the report was completed in 1939, it was not published until 1945, although many of its recommendations had already been implemented by then.
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Noble, D. (2016). Two Reports, One Empire: Race and Gender in British Post-War Social Welfare Discourse. In: Decolonizing and Feminizing Freedom. Thinking Gender in Transnational Times. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44951-1_5
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