Title: Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization
Abstract: Anne Spry Rush, Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. viii + 274 pp.REVIEWED BY BRIDGET BRERETONTHIS INTERESTING BOOK SEEKS to probe the nature and significance of heritage for middle-class West Indians between the early 19005 and the 19605. Though there is some material on Trinidad, Guyana and Barbados, the book very definitely focuses on Jamaica and Jamaicans, some chapters exclusively so. The author wants to show how middle-class Jamaicans/West Indians used their sense of Britishness to assert a place in the world, and then to negotiate decolonisation. They constructed an identity which co-existed with loyalty to their Caribbean homelands; they redefined Britishness as racially and geographically inclusive, including all who lived in the empire as of the Crown. But, the author argues, it was a class-based identity: respectability, middle-class status, were central to their sense of themselves as subjects and as progressive West Indians. The processes leading to the end of empire challenged these ideas about their identity and class position, but it was impossible to immediately abandon of thought shaped by empire. Moreover, Spry Rush wants to show that the older imperial understanding of Britishness, and the bonds it influenced a shared culture in the first half of the twentieth century, which had been created partly by West Indians at home and in the United Kingdom.Spry Rush identifies her project as part of the fairly new (starting in the late 19905) historical genre that ignores the traditional geographical boundaries of history to follow connections across national borders: the approach rather than the narrower definitions of national history. Middle-class West Indians felt British, it was part of the belief system of the more privileged colonial subjects; yet national histories did not see them as part of the national story, while Caribbean historians tended to focus rather on opposition or resistance to Britishness. Yet the story of West Indians and their identification with Britain was indeed part of a narrative. Moreover, the author insists, colonial subjects were not simply recipients of cultural imperialism from the metropole; they were also participants with the native British in the development of a shared culture.And middle-class West Indians, fer from being passive recipients or 'mimic men' (and women), shaped culture to fit their circumstances and purposes: class mobility, respectability (at home, and in the UK for the migrants), the pursuit of secondary and tertiary education, so crucial for status in the Caribbean. Many, perhaps most of them supported the movement to self-rule and were simultaneously developing strong national loyalties to their Caribbean homelands. Of course middle-class West Indians played a crucial role in negotiating decolonisation after World War II. They were also a significant percentage of the migrants to Britain both before and after the war; one thinks of Hortense in Andrea Levy's novel Smatt Island, or Montserratian E.A. Markham's family as movingly described in his memoir Against the Grain: A ip^os Memoir.To probe the development and significance of middle-class West Indians' sense of being part of a shared culture, Spry Rush concentrates on the themes of education, devotion to royalty, and the role of the BBC. (She does not address sports, especially cricket and football, or law, or modes of governance.) There are three chapters on education, three on royalty, and two on the BBC, plus one on Harold Moody and the League of Coloured People and another on the two world wars. It has to be said that there is something rather episodic, almost 'bitty', about the book's structure: it reads rather like a series of linked but separate essays. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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