The Return of the Native: White Supremacy, Indigenous Rights and the Struggle for Britain

Abstract

This article enquires into the articulation of Britishness, whiteness and indigeneity in post-Second World War British discourses of race, nationality, citizenship, and immigration. Noting how frequently, in contemporary European far right discourse, the “fantasy of a ‘return’ to socially homogeneous societies that existed ‘before’ cultural difference” (Pitcher 2009: 2) is underwritten by (factitious) claims of indigeneity that permit the equation of “labour migration” with “colonization” (Caldwell 2009: 7), I work to eviscerate the indigenism of the anti-immigration British right, which aligns white supremacism with anti-colonial political movements in ways that are or should be profoundly anathematic to the latter, without gutting the project of Indigenous rights altogether. To this end, the article reflects on the use Indigenous cultural workers, such as the Aboriginal activist-artist Burnum Burnum and Maori poet Robert Sullivan, have made of the trope of “reverse colonization,” building on their counterhistorical fictions to expose and unsettle the toxic spatial stories that continue to condition debates about race, national identity, citizenship and immigration in a 21st-century Britain normatively supposed to be post-imperial.