Out of Place

In a 1981 debate on the British Nationality Act, Enoch Powell insisted that although a black man may be a British citizen, he can never be an Englishman. This book explains why such a claim was possible to advance and impossible to defend. In the author's view, the Empire was less a place where England exerted control than where it lost command of its own identity. Analyzing imperial crisis zones, including the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and the Brixton riots of 1981, the author asks if the building of the empire completely refashioned England's narratives of national identity. He draws on a range of sources including Victorian and imperial architectural theory, country house fetishism, domestic and imperial cricket culture and and representations of urban riots on television, in novels and in parliamentary sessions. Finally, emphasizing the English preoccupation with place, he discusses some locations of Englishness that replaced the rural sites of Wordsworthian tradition, such as the Morant Bay courthouse, the 1857 uprising in India and the urban riot zones.