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This book is the first detailed study of the Commonwealth Institute's architecture and its exhibition galleries. It shows how the strikingly modern building and its dynamic displays inside worked together to create an immersive 'experience' of the Commonwealth, as part of a wider process during which post-war Britain began to focus on a future without its Empire. Featuring unpublished plans, drawings and historic photographs, the book sheds light on the various and often unstable ways in which the concept of the Commonwealth was presented to the British public. Focusing on the years between 1958-1973, it starts at the point in which the imposing Victorian edifice of the Imperial Institute in...
The Commonwealth at Work examines the nature of the widely varied machinery which is at work within the Commonwealth trying to promote cooperation between the member countries on all levels and in many different spheres, including higher education. It describes the Commonwealth Secretariat and its functions in theory and practice, along with the Commonwealth Foundation, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, and the Commonwealth's economic machinery, including the Commonwealth Liaison Committee and the Commonwealth Development Corporation. This book consists of 10 chapters and opens with a discussion on how the Commonwealth machinery that exists can grow and be more effectively used for...
This book explores national attitudes to remembering colonialism in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Examining memory through the stories of people who incited public conversation on colonialism: activists; politicians; journalists; and professional historians, this book argues that these actors mobilised the colonial past to make sense of national identity, race and belonging in the present. In focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicised public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities. A thought-provoking and powerful read that explores the divisive legacies of colonialism through oral history, this book will appeal to those researching imperialism, collective memory and cultural identity.
This book explores the history of reggae in modern Britain from the time it emerged as a cultural force in the 1970s. As basslines from Jamaica reverberated across the Atlantic, so they were received and transmitted by the UK’s Afro-Caribbean community. From roots to lovers’ rock, from deejays harnessing the dancehall crowd to dub poets reporting back from the socio-economic front line, British reggae soundtracked the inner-city experience of black youth. In time, reggae’s influence permeated the wider culture, informing the sounds and the language of popular music whilst also retaining a connection to the street-level sound systems, clubs and centres that provided space to create, protest and innovate. This book is therefore a testament to struggle and ingenuity, a collection of essays tracing reggae’s importance to both the culture and the politics of late twentieth and early twenty-first century Britain.
After the Second World War, Britain's overseas empire disintegrated. But over the next seventy years, empire came to define Britain and its people as never before. Drawing on a mass of new research, Riley tells a story of immigration and exclusion, social strife and cultural transformation. It is the story that best explains Britain today.