At Home in Empire Conference – Reflections on the Morning Panels

The At Home in Empire: Colonial Experiences of Intimacy and Mobility Conference 2021 has now taken place, and having had several weeks to digest and reflect upon the fantastic papers given by our speakers, we thought this blog would be a good place to share some of the exciting research and thought-provoking ideas that were highlighted during the conference.

To begin the first panel of the day, ‘Curating and Collecting: Domesticity on Display’, Charlotte Johnson introduced us to her research on the collections of Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Curzon amassed an extensive collection of Asian and imperial objects during his time in India, which he sent to be displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Later, they were used in the creation of an ‘Eastern Museum’ at Kedleston Hall, Curzon’s ancestral home. Using examples of various objects and records from both the V&A and Kedleston Hall, Charlotte demonstrated how the collecting and curating of these objects embodied imperial mobilities, with the histories of the objects often constructed so as to centre the narrative of Lord Curzon. In doing so, they created silences of empire, obscuring source communities and colonial practices.

Above: some of the objects from Lord Curzon’s collection of Asian and imperial objects discussed by Charlotte Johnson.

Continuing the theme of the individual colonial figure as a collector and curator, Carl Deußen’s paper explored non-European artefacts in imperial German homes through the the example of Wilhem Joest, an ethnographer in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Photographs of Joest’s flat reveal it was extensively decorated with artefacts, curios and souvenirs from his travels, as well as diaries, letters and publications. Deußen suggested that Joest’s collecting and the display of objects throughout his home was a form of constructed empire: his selection of artefacts aimed to present an image of a strong and static empire, which disguised the true nature of a fragile relationship between colony and metropole. Simultaneously, the size and composition of Joest’s collection worked to legitimise his status within the field of anthropology.

The final paper of the panel shifted our attention to present-day interpretations and displays of domestic settings of West Africa and Caribbean plantations within British museums. Matthew Jones used examples of displays in several museums to demonstrate how resistance to enslavement is often portrayed through a lens of masculine military conflict. In doing so, Matthew argued that the absence of domestic spaces neglects their role as settings from which everyday resistances to slavery were enacted and the legacy of the Middle Passage was lived out. In doing so, the interconnectedness of homemaking and resistance is lost, and the narrative of the slave trade and resistance becomes a gendered history in which the roles of free and enslaved African women are often erased.

Overall, the panel highlighted the role of the coloniser as central in the construction of representations of imperial domesticity. In doing so, the papers reveal how the roles of indigenous and enslaved peoples in the creation and history of objects, as well their lived experiences in domestic spaces, are often marginalised or absent through the practice of collecting and displaying empire.

The second panel of the morning explored questions around the making and remaking of home in colonial contexts. Dr Claudia Soares began by interrogating the experiences of poor children sent to Canada as a result of the policies of major British charities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Foregrounding the voices of these children, Claudia used publications and newsletters from the institutions to demonstrate the changing and complex meanings children associated with their new environments. These meanings were dependent on the children’s ages, memories and experiences of the Old Country and of Canada. Case studies of children revealed common themes of homesickness, the difficulties of maintaining family ties over time and space, and the highly mobile nature of many migrant children as they sought to establish a place they could call ‘home’.

Above: British immigrant children from Dr Barnardo’s Homes at landing stage, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Source: Isaac Erb. Library and Archives Canada, PA-041785

Following on from this discussion, Dr Dayana Ariffin turned our focus to the colonial construction of family in British Malaya. Through the study of her grandfather, Noor Mahmud Hashim, Dayana examined the complexities of navigating identity and home against a backdrop of colonialism and increasing nationalism. Born to a Scottish mother and Indian father, Noor lived in Singapore, India, and Malaya, eventually making Kuala Lumpur his home. This personal story challenges the dominant narrative in Malaysian history of the binary of resistance or collaboration with colonial powers, highlighting the mobilised identities of Noor as he occupied space between indigenous and colonial identity, which were further complicated by his role as a colonial civil servant and the intricacies of social class.

In her fascinating paper, Yasmin Shamma engaged with Palestinian cookbooks, poems and the testimonies of refugees to examine ideas of cooking, waiting and making-home when away from home. She took us on a journey through refugee camps, arguing that cooking traditional recipes in these environments allows refugees to continue cultural practices. By preserving the ingredients to cook these dishes, refugees are preserving their agriculture and connection to ‘home’, whilst engaging in a form of everyday resistance to their dislocation.

Kate McGregor’s paper continued with examining ideas of dislocation and preserving a sense of ‘home’, through the lens of imperial Germany. Using case studies of two German women living in the African Colonies at the turn of the twentieth century, Kate explored their roles in recreating a German Christmas for their families. This demonstrated the women’s use of specific traditions, Christmas decorations, songs and food to capture a sense of weihnactsstimmung, the Christmas mood. In enacting a German Christmas, Kate argued these women played a significant part in ensuring the cultural heritage of their families, as well as helping to solidify white German identities in colonial settings and therefore protecting their racial integrity.

Above: Kate McGregor discussed the lives of Helene von Falkenhausen and Magdelene von Prince; two German women who strove to create the experience of a traditional German Christmas for their families, whilst living in colonial Africa.

These papers each demonstrated the complexities of identity and home when coupled with colonial mobility or displacement, highlighting a fundamental human need to hold onto or recreate a sense of home, irrespective of age, gender, time or place. The rich cross-section of papers left us with much to think about as we took a break for lunch, and the scope of stimulating topics continued in the afternoon session, and will be discussed in the next blog post.

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A Conversation with Dr Kate Smith

As the day of the conference draws near, we are delighted to introduce our keynote speaker Dr Kate Smith and hear more about her work and thoughts on the themes of the conference. Kate Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Birmingham. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick in 2010, followed by a fellowship at the University of Milwaukee. She was a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded East India Company at Home 1757-1857 project before joining the University of Birmingham in 2014.

Q: Can you tell us a little about your research interests and how they developed?

I have long been interested in material cultures and the material world. With my first book, I was interested in questions of consumption and production and how consumers understood the objects that they were buying during the eighteenth century. How were they able to decipher questions of skill and value? How did their relationship to production change? I think that early work was informed by thinking about the production of these objects in a global context. I was interested in how these processes of production were informed by global interactions and trade, and how consumers were interested in those influences. In some ways these questions also informed on my second project, the East India Company at Home, led by Margot Finn.

Q: The East India Company at Home is a really significant project, can you tell us a little bit more about your involvement and the themes you were exploring?

My interest initially was about the material culture coming from the Indian subcontinent and from East Asia and how it was shaping the country house in Britain. I had done some earlier work thinking about women and how they used material culture as a means of trying to create and express identity. As I got further into the project, I was attentive to how gender was at stake in the movement of these objects into country houses and how objects were used in these spaces.

With the East India Company project, we were considering not only this shifting material culture and the kind of influence it was having, but how that material culture was also moving because of people’s relationships to each other. It was not just about trade and processes of private trade, but things moving because people wanted them to. People used objects for multiple different purposes, including building affective relationships with others. They also used them to produce identities at particular points. In the project, we also became really interested in the idea of return and what happened when people who had been out in the empire returned and had to reconfigure themselves in Britain. One of the ways they did this was through material culture and houses.

Q: How does your current research build and develop some of these themes?

The East India Company at Home project brought up questions of longing and loss. There seemed to be so much about people longing for a space they were not in and longing for family members. There was anxiety about letters not arriving, gifts not getting through, missing things. This led on to the project I am doing now which is thinking about lost property and what happens when people lost things, particularly in the long eighteenth century. Moments of loss are important for understanding what possession might have meant in the first place. It is only when you lose things that you have to think about maintaining possession and what it might mean to own something.

I am thinking about not just objects that go missing but also people who go missing by comparing lost property notices with runaway notices. I’m interested in the ambiguities of people as property in eighteenth-century Britain and particularly how such ambiguities impacted women and enslaved people. To lose things is to lose part of oneself or lose possession of oneself. The fragility of identity and a sense of self is exposed in these moments of losing things. Similarly, part of the move to runaway is to assert self-possession. When we see these lost property notices alongside runaway notices, are we seeing similar processes at stake? How do you maintain possession of oneself? I think that this project relates back to these bigger questions of empire which are about trying to navigate identity and power.

Englefield House by John Constable, c.1832

Q: What role does “home” play in your work?

One of the things I found with country house research, was a wealth of interesting research exploring how these sites were built and maintained. Within this though, I became interesting in the idea of home-building (as opposed to house building). I was interested in the emotional labour at stake in the creation of these sites as meaningful spaces. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperial families worked hard to try and ensure that a particular site remained ‘home’. Other members of the family were often out in the empire, setting up their own homes and involved in their own home-building projects. Letter writing was crucial and was used to keep people involved and updated with any changes to the home so that it remained a recognisable site to these family members in distant places: a recognisable and known place to return to.

Such home-building also played into the idea of metropole. There was an idea of ‘here’ and ‘there’, but such distinctions needed to be established and were often fragile. It took work on the part of different people to evoke an idea of Britain as the centre of empire, that that’s where home is and everywhere else is ‘elsewhere’. We think about these histories of home and histories of family as mundane and not part of these grander narratives but of course they are. These histories are important for lots of different reasons, but they were central to the idea of Britain as an imperial state.

Our thanks to Dr Kate Smith for a wonderful initial conversation and thoughts on the topics of home, empire, mobility, and intimacy. We look forward to hearing more about her research and discussing these questions with all our panellists at the conference on 13 March 132021.

Registration has now reopened with a very limited number of spaces available. Once full, please contact us on athomeinempire2021@gmail.com to be added to the waiting list should anyone not be able to attend.

David Lambert : 20 Feb 2021 11:08 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Introducing our Panels

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/ceim/ahie_prov_prog_18.01.21.pdf

We are very excited to reveal the programme for the At Home in Empire conference, to be held on 13th March 2021. You can register to attend this one-day interdisciplinary conference HERE. We were overwhelmed by the number of fascinating responses to our Call for Papers and deciding on the final programme was one of the most difficult tasks of conference-planning to date. The panels, which vary across different spaces and periods, cover a range of topics related to the home, intimacy, and mobility, and we hope to see as many people as possible in March to hear these fascinating papers.

Session 1: Curating and Collecting: Domesticity on Display

Charlotte Johnson (AHRC Midlands4Cities funded PhD University of Birmingham): Colonial mobilities on display: the ‘Eastern Museum’ at Kedleston Hall

Matthew Jones (CHASE AHRC funded doctoral student at the University of Sussex in Art History): Displaying resistance: the absence of domestic life in narrative of enslavement

Carl Deussen (PhD at the University of Amsterdam and holds a research position at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne): Exotic Interiors. Ethnographic Collecting and the Bourgeois Home in Imperial Germany

Kedleston Hall: This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

This panel brings together researchers from across history and the history of art to consider the varied ways in which empire and domesticity have been displayed. Examining varied case studies that underscore the significance of material cultures and museum practices, these papers explore the politics of collecting and curating the home as both a space of display and a space on display.

Session 2 - Making and Re-making Home

Claudia Soares (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary University of London): Understandings of home, family, and belonging for poor child migrants from institutional care, Britain, Australia and Canada c.1820-1920

Dayana Ariffin (Senior Lecturer at the History Department, the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur): What makes a colonial family? Noor Mahmud Hashim’s journey in finding home and family in British Malaya

Kate McGregor (PhD Candidate, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada): Working for Weihnachtsstimmung: German Women’s Place in the Recreation and Reproduction of German Culture and Identity in the African Colonies, 1894- 1906

Yasmine Shamma (Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading): Home is where the Warak Anab is: The Palestinian Poetics of Cooking as home-making

How did people make and remake homes across colonial and post-colonial spaces? Papers on this panel investigate the multiple and complex ways in which the home can be recreated and continued against a backdrop of displacement and instability. These researchers centre the role of the family and culture in the practices of home-making across disparate spaces, demonstrating how individuals and groups sought to preserve old identities or forge new ones.

Session 3 - In Between Worlds: Mobile Lives and Distant Homes

Katie Donnington (Senior Lecturer in History in the Division of Law and Social Sciences at London South Bank University): ‘Domesticating slavery: At home with the Hibberts between Jamaica and England’

Alex Lindgren-Gibson (Assistant Professor of European History at the University of Mississippi): Piecing Together Home: Making Sense of Family and Empire in the Papers of Mermanjan

Mikko Toivanen (2021 postdoctoral visiting fellowship at the Munich Centre for Global History of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität): Imperial childhoods in transit: the journey of Corry and Hugh Loudon to the Dutch East Indies in 1871-2

George Hibbert: This photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Centred on the theme of mobility, these papers suggest the implications of distance and movement on the colonial experiences of home and family. Addressing different periods and geographies, this panel foregrounds the difficulties and anxieties evoked by attempts to navigate between different worlds, raising questions about identity and belonging.

Session 4 - Spaces of Encounter

Marie Grace Brown (Associate Professor at the University of Kansas): Running Bachelors, Running Households: Kitchens and Intimacy in Imperial Sudan

Rosie Dias (Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Warwick): The View from the Veranda: Negotiating Gender and Race in Colonial South Asia

Ellen Smith (AHRC Midlands4Cities funded history PhD University of Leicester): Interactions with India and Indians: Home Encounters in Colonial South Asia

Marianne North in Mrs Cameron's House: This photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Recognising the home as a space of encounter, this panel evokes the domestic setting as one of negotiation, intimacy, and power. Bringing themes of race and gender to the forefront of colonial life, these researchers frame the home as a contact zone where relationships between ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’ could be interrupted and disrupted.

Keynote

The conference will conclude with our keynote speaker, Dr Kate Smith from the University of Birmingham.

Together, we hope that these panels will provoke new questions and discussions about what it meant to be ‘at home in empire’. Touching on themes of intimacy and mobility, they invite us to consider the anxieties that accompanied colonial experiences and representations. Stretching across several centuries, continents, and empires, the conference will offer an interdisciplinary platform to problematize the binaries of public and private, coloniser and colonised, centring the complex meanings of home and the messiness of everyday life in the colonial and post-colonial context. We look forward to you joining us in March.

David Lambert : 25 Jan 2021 10:26 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Top Tips for Conference Planning

In the third blog accompanying the At Home In Empire: Colonial Experiences of Intimacy and Mobility conference, Hannah Dennettand Liz Egan share their experience of planning a conference.

The Warwick Humanities Research Centre Doctoral Fellowship competition awards three fellowships to doctoral students supervised in the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Warwick and is designed to allow students to enhance their PhD research and give them the opportunity to organise a one-day interdisciplinary conference on a topic close to their dissertation area. We hope that this blog encourages any Warwick doctoral candidates to apply to this competition, but also offers advice and support to anyone considering running their first academic conference. As first-time organisers, we wanted to share our 'top tips' for approaching this daunting task.

Start Early: You can never start planning too early!

The Warwick HRC Doctoral Fellowship competition closes in March, which gives potential applicants plenty of time to craft, draft and finalise their conference proposals. There are several elements to the application process, including creating a prospective programme for the day, with possible timings and numbers of speakers/panels, and a budget for the event. While the world of online conferences currently means budgeting for travel, accommodation and catering may not be a priority this year, these are important costs you may need to factor into future conference plans. By starting early, you can ensure you have enough time to gather all the information you need and be as prepared as possible. Once you have decided on a potential date, you also need to allow plenty of notice when inviting keynote speakers.

Collaborate: Two heads are better than one!

Co-organising a conference is a great way to work with another person with similar interests to explore a common theme, as well as sharing the workload. Working together has helped us to develop the scope of our conference theme to encompass our overlapping interests in imperial history. Dividing tasks between two people also means you can play to each other’s strengths and stay on task. For us, deciding panels has been one of the most difficult tasks we have faced so far, but collaborating ensured we captured different perspectives across a range of disciplines, periods and locations. If you are organising a conference on your own, remember to reach out to others for support and advice.

Ask for advice: Plenty of people have gone before you!

Never be afraid to ask for advice. Sue Rae, the HRC administrator, is a fount of knowledge and an essential source of support and advice at every stage of the application and organisation process. Outside the HRC, colleagues and peers will be able to offer advice from their own experiences. As more conferences move online, seeking support from others will help you to understand what works well in the digital world and how to make the most of online platforms.

Choose a theme: What interests you?

Choose a theme that relates to your own research and which will help you to connect with scholars across the world working on similar areas. It was important to us that our theme crossed disciplines and encompassed different perspectives on the multiple meanings of home. We thought carefully about the kind of conference we would most want to attend, and used this to help us shape our core themes, and eventually our Call for Papers. A strong theme gives the conference focus - essential when selecting panels.

Spread the word: Maximise your connections!

Just as with asking for advice, make the most of the people around you to help advertise the Call for Papers and the conference as a whole. Social media is becoming an increasingly important avenue for academics, and a strong Twitter presence can help raise the profile of your conference. Mailing lists, forums such as H-Net, and individual connections can all play an important part in ensuring your conference reaches interested scholars from across the globe.

Ultimately, planning a conference is an exciting challenge, so make the most of the opportunity!

David Lambert : 10 Dec 2020 16:57 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Intimacy and Mobility in Empire: Black Experiences and the Metropole

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/ceim/

In the second blog accompanying the At Home In Empire: Colonial Experiences of Intimacy and Mobility conference, Hannah Dennett examines how the records of the Foundling Hospital can highlight black experiences of intimacy and mobility in eighteenth-century London.

For many white British people scattered throughout the colonial world of the eighteenth century, returning ‘home’ to the metropole was their eventual aim. People, such as East India Company officials, civil servants, plantation holders and military men, who spent periods living and working in the East Indies and West Indies, returned ‘home’ to Britain after services had been fulfilled or fortunes made. The movement of these white British individuals and families between colonial holdings and Britain also precipitated the movement of people of colour owned or employed by them. Enslaved or indentured domestic servants brought to England from the East Indies and West Indies contributed to the growing population of people of colour in Britain during this period. In this blog I highlight how records from the Foundling Hospital of eighteenth-century London offer us a window into some of the lives of these people of colour, often hidden from view because of the lack of sources relating to their experiences.

Established in 1741, the Foundling Hospital took into its care infants from mothers either unable or unwilling to provide for them. From 1763 mothers were required to submit a petition to the Foundling Hospital General Committee as part of the admission process. Most women petitioning the Foundling Hospital were young, unmarried mothers, predominately working as domestic servants. Consequently, in almost all cases, an illegitimate child left the mother economically vulnerable and socially marginalised. Amongst these petitions it is possible to find some which suggest a child was an infant of colour, and this allows us to start examining the experiences of their mothers in London during this period.

William Hogarth, 1739. An etching and engraving of children at the Foundling Hospital. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

Lucy Strange submitted a petition to the Foundling Hospital Committee on 17^thNovember 1773 to have her one-month old son admitted. It reveals that she was ‘born in the East Indies and was sent to England by her master with the care of a child’. During the voyage she was ‘Debauched and got with Child’ (Foundling Hospital, 1773). The suggestion here is that Lucy was acting as nanny, or ayah, to a child of a white English family living in the East Indies (Visram, 1986). Many families sent their children ‘home’ to England and into the care of extended family members to receive an English upbringing and education. They were often accompanied on the voyage by indigenous servants, and this seems to be the reason for Lucy’s presence in London. It appears that Lucy was raped during the voyage to England, demonstrating that movement between the colonies and the metropole placed Lucy in a vulnerable position, which ultimately resulted in sexual violence. Unmarried, pregnant and in a foreign city, she was further marginalised by her lack of understanding of the English language. It is not clear how Lucy found out about the Foundling Hospital but when her son, Christopher Rowland, was admitted into the institution it would appear the difficulties she faced were resolved and she could return ‘home’ to her master in the East Indies.

Johan Zoffany, Colonel Blair with his Family and an Indian Ayah, 1786. Photo © Tate (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported)) https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/zoffany-colonel-blair-with-his-family-and-an-indian-ayah-t12610

The return to England of Captain Grenadire and his family from Antigua impacted the circumstances of his servant, Henrietta Dislie. Before her departure from Antigua with her master, Henriette failed to disclose that she was ‘with child by a European, a Clerk to a Store keeper in the said Island’. She was ‘delivered on her passage of a Male Mulatto Child’ (Foundling Hospital, 1780). (Subsequent records of the Foundling Hospital reveal that Henrietta had a daughter, not a son). We do not know if this is another example of sexual violence or if some sort of relationship existed between the clerk and Henrietta Relationships between white men in power and enslaved black women were common in the Caribbean at this time, but this did not necessarily mean they were wholly consensual (Livesay, 2018, pp.3-4). If Henrietta’s application to the institution was unsuccessful, her petition states she was to be discharged from her position; her only security in a country where she was without any support networks to drawn upon. From the available documents it is unclear what Henrietta’s status was, as enslaved black individuals brought to England from the Caribbean were often referred to as servants. However the threat of losing her position suggests that Henrietta was a free black woman. Henrietta’s daughter, Jane Eyre, was admitted to the Foundling Hospital on 6^th December 1780, aged ten weeks, and this allowed Henrietta to retain her position in the service of the Captain’s family.

Other examples within the petitions reveal consensual relationships between white women and black men living in Britain during this period. The black population is estimated to have reached approximately 10,000 in the eighteenth century, including free black men (and some women) who had made Britain their home (Shyllon, 1977). These individuals were sometimes enslaved domestic servants who had been granted manumission, sailors who worked the ships travelling between the metropole and the colonies, or runaway slaves who had evaded recapture. Susannah Wright petitioned the Foundling Hospital to have her daughter admitted in June 1804. She states that ‘your petitioner was seduced under a promise of Marriage by a Person who on finding your petitioner pregnant deserted her’. That person was George Clark, a fellow servant of Susannah’s and a ‘Man of Colour’ (Foundling Hospital, 1804). Sexual encounters or courtships between servants in the same house appear frequently in testimonies of women with illegitimate infants who petitioned the Hospital and Susannah’s story highlights this. Simultaneously, it again reveals an unmarried mother removed from her everyday surroundings and left isolated in an unfamiliar city. Desertion by the father is also a common theme within the petitions of the period and speaks to the relative ease with which even men of the lower ranks could move throughout the country and beyond. Many such petitions mention that the fathers, on discovering an unwanted pregnancy, left for the East Indies, West Indies or America. Such movement disrupted relationships which the young women frequently expected to result in marriage.

The Foundling Hospital provided a resolution to the desperate circumstances in which these women found themselves, as unmarried mothers with new-born infants in an unfamiliar city. But their stories also reveal insights into interracial relationships and sexual violence and the ways in which mobility across the empire perpetuated trauma and dislocations from the familiar which impacted the lives of some people of colour present in London during the eighteenth century.

Hannah Dennett is a PhD student at the Department of History, University of Warwick. Her project Forgotten Foundlings: Black Lives and the Eighteenth-Century Foundling Hospital is in collaboration with the Foundling Museum, London, and is funded through the AHRC’s Midlands4Cities consortium.

For more information about the history of the Foundling Hospital and the work of the Foundling Museum: https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

References

Foundling Hospital, A/FH/A/08/001/001/004, Petitions, 1773 (London Metropolitan Archives).

Foundling Hospital, A/FH/A/08/001/011, Petitions, 1780 (London Metropolitan Archives).

Foundling Hospital, A/FH/A/08/001/002/001/013/010, Petitions, 1804 (London Metropolitan Archives).

Livesay, Daniel, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

Folarian Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555-1833 (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, 1977).

Visram, Rozina, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: The Story of Indian in Britain 1700-1947 (Oxon: Routledge Revivals, 2015).

David Lambert : 21 Oct 2020 08:17 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

At Home in Empire? Whiteness and Jamaica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Writing about web page https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/ceim/

To accompany the At Home in Empire: Colonial Experiences of Intimacy and Mobility conference, HRC doctoral fellows Hannah Dennett and Liz Egan will be writing a blog reflecting on their own research, the themes of the conference, and the practicalities of putting together an interdisciplinary event. In the first part of this series, Liz explores how the themes of home and mobility interact with her PhD research ‘Constructing and Challenging Creole Whiteness in Jamaica, 1865-1938’.

The theme of home generates multiple interpretations, particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts. In this blog, I reflect on the home as a thread that runs through my own PhD project, knitting together the ways in which being ‘white’ was performed, discussed, and challenged in Jamaica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did whiteness function as social and cultural capital that coincided with political and economic power? How did a dominant white minority understand themselves and how were they understood by others? What can this tell us about the legacies of slavery and Jamaica’s relationship with Britain? Across these questions, the home looms as both a material place and imagined space.

Mary Gaunt, from the frontispiece of Mary Gaunt, Alone in West Africa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912).

The space of the home offers insight into the exclusive cultures of white society. Since the pre-emancipation period, white Jamaicans were associated with a culture of hospitality. Small numbers and relative isolation meant white travellers across the island often enjoyed a warm welcome in elite homes (Burnard, 2004; Petley, 2012). This culture of hospitality appears to have persisted into the twentieth century as white travel writers often commented on the comfortable homes they were invited to stay in as they toured the island. The home emerges as something of a social hub, with Australian writer Mary Gaunt enjoying games of bridge with her hostess and other guests either on the veranda or out on the tennis courts. Opportunities for gossip, these late afternoon games could turn ‘sometimes very wild’ (Gaunt, 1932, p. 239).

“Livingstone Family,” National Library of Jamaica Digital Collection, accessed June 25, 2020, https://nljdigital.nlj.gov.jm/items/show/2347.

In the background of these elite homes, we cannot forget the role of domestic service and the racial inequalities manifested in the division of labour – exemplified, perhaps, by the Livingstone family photograph. Colour also dictated who received invitations. American traveller Harry Franck described a conversation with a light-skinned schoolteacher who confidently explained to him that he would never invite one of his dark-skinned colleagues to his house for fear the man might romantically pursue his daughter; ‘for the coloured girl forever loses caste by marrying a black man’. Similarly, the schoolteacher explained a white man would have the same concerns, ‘so I do not go to his house, even if I am asked, for he would be patronizing; and I do not invite a white man to my house because I know he would feel he was doing me a favour and an honour’ (Franck, 1920, pp 412-3).

In his memoir, the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who was born in Jamaica in 1932, also discussed how the family was one of the key arenas in which these complex, often euphemistic codes of race and colour were taught. While his school friends were ‘clever scholarship youths of all colours, shades and backgrounds’, Hall recalled how ‘only those considered by my family equals in social status and of the “right” colour’ could be invited home (Hall and Schwarz, 2018, p. 54). Historically, the colonial construction of racial hierarchies in Jamaica was interwoven with questions of colour and class. Embedded in the violent history of slavery, Henrice Altink has argued that lighter-skin was valorised into the twentieth century and could bring access, for example, to higher-paid jobs or social mobility. Unpicking further this relationship between colourism and the structures of whiteness is central to my research and, as Hall and Altink have suggested, the home and family are key lenses though which to interrogate this (Altink, 2019).

The themes of home and mobility also evoke important questions about the relationship between Jamaica and Britain. Focusing on the immediate post-emancipation decades, Phillip Curtin proposed that the white Jamaican elite envisaged themselves as exiles hoping to one day return permanently to the “mother country” (Curtin, 1955, pp 55-57). Many elite families sent their children to Britain for their education, and I’m interested to explore further how white Jamaicans identified with both Britain and Jamaica into the twentieth century. Mobility was not a white preserve of course. The experiences of black Jamaicans at the metropole and elsewhere were often transformative to their thinking about the ways in which race operated in the British Empire. It was in London that Una Marson wrote poetry that longed for the beauty of Jamaica, but which also evoked the pain of her feelings of rejection on the capital's streets. The mobility of the Caribbean diaspora afforded new networks and new tools which reverberated back to Jamaica and contributed to increasing challenges to systems of colonialism and whiteness.

The home, as a domestic setting, a social space, and as a site of contested belonging, can thus offer multiple means of exploring the structures and experiences of empire and race. It is a fertile space for discussion, and as submissions to the conference arrive, Hannah and I are looking forward to the rich conversations we hope these different conceptualisations will produce next year.

Liz Egan, PhD student, Department of History, University of Warwick

References

Altink, Henrice, Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica (Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 2019).

Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Curtin, Philip D., Two Jamaicas: the Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830-1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955).

Franck, Harry A., Roaming Through the West Indies (New York: The Century Co., 1920).

Gaunt, Mary, Reflection – In Jamaica (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1932).

Hall, Stuart with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands (UK: Penguin Books, 2018).

Petley, Christer, ‘Gluttony, Excess, and the Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean’, Atlantic Studies, 9:1 (2012) 85-106.

David Lambert : 09 Oct 2020 08:25 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem