Race and Immigration in the Era of Decolonization

This talk will examine debates surrounding immigration in the United Kingdom, South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1960s and 1970s. South Africa in 1961 and Rhodesia in 1965 broke away from the British Empire and Commonwealth in order to continue to pursue racially-­‐based settler colonial rule. This was reflected in their immigration policies, which aggressively recruited immigrants defined as white by the Rhodesian and South African governments as they sought to mount a demographic defense of minority rule in a rapidly decolonizing continent. Though less explicit in racial ideology, the United Kingdom in the same period began to restrict immigration from the former empire with the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968. In all three cases decolonization allowed the retreat from the universalizing rhetoric of the postwar British Empire to a racially-­‐defined nation, visible in the regulation of immigration.
Sponsored by the Center for New Racial Studies

hm 4/17/12