Are we too focussed on the colonial past?

Should we look to Singapore instead?

In his masterwork of anti-colonial analysis, Frantz Fanon (1963: 37) observes that the “colonial world is a world divided into compartments.” This spatial arrangement produces two realities—the reality of the settler and the reality of the native. In this world “cut in two,” the “racial” of “racial capitalism” is an acute condition, lived in the deep structure and on the surface of everyday life: “You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich” (40). In blunt terms, the base and superstructure are perfectly aligned. Here we understand that spatial separation—a kind of zoning—is central to the group differentiations that come to travel under the sign of race. Crucially, in Fanon’s analysis, the zone of the native is a site of dense ideological production. Fanon paraphrases the settler’s image of the native: “He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces” (41). In this concern with the interplay of a divided geography and the force of culture in the making of racial difference, Fanon’s analysis anticipates Edward Said’s ([1978] 2014) path-making study of Orientalism, in which representation (such as in the writings of Gustave Flaubert or Ernest Renan) is understood as foundational to racial division. Said’s insistence on the generative power of discourse, on the material, geopolitical, and world-making force of culture, has come to define the field of postcolonial theory and has been highly influential in theorizations of racialization.

The habits drawn from this tradition continue to shape our analytic habits in postimperial Britain. In my own work, for example, drawing on Said, I have tracked continuities between the Orientalist representations of women’s bodies in colonial India and the way South Asian women are then policed at the UK border. References to colonial history and to the methods of analysis produced by critics of empire play a central role in academic attempts to intervene in conversations about race in Britain. This approach is one that seeks to return historical context to contemporary racism. Nadine El-Enany’s (B)ordering Britain (2020) and Ian Sanjay Patel’s We Are Here Because You Were There (2021), for example, consider the end of empire and the development of Britain’s immigration regime as entangled processes through which a nation-state was carved out of an imperial one. This work functions as a crucial corrective to a long-held national story that obscures the recent imperial past, most potently found in the claim made by Enoch Powell, the architect of anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain, that, with the exception of India, Britain never had an empire. According to a speech Powell gave at Trinity College, Dublin, Britain’s empire was a mere “hallucination” that developed only in the period of decolonization (Nairn 1970). Contemporary Conservative politicians translate this claim into the diction of the day: Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, remarked that she didn’t care about colonialism, and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared that campaigns for decolonization were censorship. In the face of this avowed anti-history, there is some continued scholarly and public significance to talking about Britain’s relatively recent colonial exploits.

Many recent accounts, including my own, engage Patrick Wolfe’s (2016: 5) pithy claim that “race is colonialism speaking.” Crucially, the notion that race might be a form of speech appears to emphasize its discursive character. As such, when we attend to the making of race in the present, we attend to its symbolic, cultural, and discursive construction. Invariably, in doing so, we analyze the continuities between the constructions of race we witness in colonial literary and cultural archives, and those we see in contemporary representations. Even the titular claim of this special issue—that Europe is postimperial—is subject to some caution, with exemplary thinkers insisting on the continuities of the colonial form. Equally, though the signature racial differentiations intrinsic to capitalist production remain, they are remade in response to present crises in capitalism, rather than through a process of linear development. If, as Arun Kundnani (2020) writes, the “past cannot serve as an alibi for the present,” then our attempts to understand racial capitalism in Britain today—particularly following its departure from the European Union (EU)—requires us to attend to Britain’s changing status, as well as its colonial inheritance. Borrowing from Raymond Williams’s (1977) idea of the “residual,” the “dominant,” and the “emergent,” I seek to consider how different methods of group differentiation interact. If we decide, a priori, that race making will always follow colonial grooves, we may miss new methods of group differentiation. Britain has played a huge role in constructing the contemporary world order through its imperial world making. Yet now Britain encounters that world as a still powerful but significantly diminished player. As such, when we examine how Britain navigates a global market in labor and resources, it may be germane to place its policies in a global frame alongside other actors, including those that were former colonial possessions or protectorates.

Following from Jacob Dlamini’s (2020) notion that we need to “cut race down to analytic size,” I want to suggest that we need to cut the colonial down to analytic size. This leads me to a series of claims and questions about the changing role of the symbolic, the discursive, and the cultural. I contend that racial capitalism in Britain may be discarding cultural mechanisms of race making and employing processes of group differentiation that have been trialed in the postcolonial contexts of Southern and Eastern economies that were once on the imperial periphery. In thinking through the dominant, the residual, and the emergent, I want to exert some pressure on some defining analytical habits within the tradition of both cultural studies and the wider study of racialization. The first, as I have suggested above, is the habit of drawing lines of continuity from the colonial past; the second, the assumption that “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” to use Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s (2006: 28) insightful definition of racism, relies on an attendant cultural machinery that insists on the other’s inferiority. Gargi Bhattacharyya’s (2024: 25) work on racial capitalism is instructive here: “Some of what we wish otherwise does not require any overt machinery of hate-making at all. Hatred may not come into the picture. And yet this raciality without any necessary hatred might still kill you.”

Equally, of course, forms of violent racial antipathy endure—they too might kill you. These antipathies are increasingly mobilized through the lurid psychosocial currents of what Richard Seymour (2024a) has dubbed “disaster nationalism.” Seymour identifies the “apocalyptic nationalism that has swept several far-right leaders to power” (4) and that is reshaping the political terrain more broadly through moments of rupture. He describes one such moment (in the United States) as defined by “the incoherent pastiche of conspiracist bricolage, hallucinatory anti-communism, lurid theories of radical sexual evil and theological millenarianism” (11). This global formation—Seymour focuses on the Philippines, the United States, India, and Brazil—takes on a particular character in Britain. Articulating experiences of infrastructural decline, economic instability, and the retreat of democratic institutional forms as profit-driven digital mediation ascends to an enduring Powellite racism; disaster nationalism in Britain treats the immigrant as a civilizational threat. While taking seriously that, as Seymour observes, “disaster nationalist leaders are pathfinders for a new type of fascism” (11), I want to suggest that we attend to that which seems to fall outside their field of vision.

To understand the relationship among spatial division, group differentiation, and the “machinery of hate-making,” I contrast two zones in the pattern of racial capitalism in Britain: hotel housing for people seeking asylum and farms reliant on temporary migrant labor. The former has been subject to lurid reactionary fantasy, corporate media obsession, and networked rage, culminating in a frenzied series of mob attacks. Meanwhile, the latter barely registers in public discourse. In this article, I am trying to understand why some spaces function as symbolically dense sites while others are culturally underdetermined. To contextualize this uneven distribution of social and cultural energy, I suggest that, rather than turn toward the colonial past, we may need to consider Britain’s racial arrangements in dialogue with those that organize certain Asian polities, such as Singapore and the Gulf states. In these examples, we can see highly effective models of group differentiation in which a migrant worker may rarely interact with a citizen. In this way, developed forms of zoning, common in Asia and ascendant in Britain, allow for states to obscure their reliance on migrant labor. This conjunctural analysis suggests that the denigrations familiar from colonial race making may not be necessary for group differentiation: techniques of spatial separation and quasi-carceral confinement may be sufficient. As such, scholarly attention will need to consider what ideological work is done by the absence of discursive density that surrounds certain locales, in a time of “disaster nationalism.” One need not decide a priori that these divisions are racial in order to develop the analysis drawn from critiques of racial capitalism. As such, my intention here is not to emphasize the racial character of group differentiation but to explore how group differentiation is made and remade under new circumstances. To set up this tale of two camps, I will briefly attend to theories of spatial division and states of exception.

Keep reading my latest article for South Atlantic Quarterly