Anna Crisp (KCL) - 2018-19 Students
anna.crisp@kcl.ac.uk

Remembering colonialism: biopolitics and memory in Britain and the making of a racial state

This thesis investigates collective memory of British colonialism in public space, drawing from the fields of memory studies, critical race theory, bio/necropolitics and postcolonial studies as theoretical coordinates. The three fields share a fundamental core in providing revisionary critiques of dominant social, cultural and political texts: each discipline considers how public discourse forms social identities. However, interdisciplinary convergence between these fields faces challenges posed by the particular national contexts shaping their inquiry: in Britain, memories of world wars and the Holocaust eclipse colonial memory, and CRT is largely particular to the race-conscious critique of ‘liberal assumptions’ in US civil rights law from which it emerged. The thesis confronts these challenges. Building on memory work’s excavation of socio-cultural sites and texts as key indicators of national self-determination, the project uses contemporary memorial practices to examine Britain’s relationship with colonial history. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary methodology with methods from cultural studies, the thesis undertakes an intertextual analysis of state commemorative practices to ascertain the colonialities (and technologies) of power that produce narratives about the past in the British context.