Abstract
Abstract
The eagerness of post-imperial societies to leave empire behind is often described with the language of “forgetting” and “amnesia.” Yet these metaphors imply an involuntary and irreparable loss of memory. The afterlives of Britain’s colonial wars have been shaped instead by intentional and only partly successful efforts to suppress the past. Beyond the heights of state-sanctioned memory, there was no great silence, no sudden imposition of taboos, after the wars of decolonization ended. The same fierce accusations, uneasy self-reproaches, and troubling images that preoccupied contemporaries in the 1950s continued to do so in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Without apparent interruption, unease about colonial violence was managed retrospectively as it had been contemporaneously: by talking about it, writing about it, and acting it out.
Publisher
Oxford University PressNew York