Nehru Memorial Museum and Library

cordially invites you to a Public Lecture

in the ‘India and the Wider World' series

at 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, 17 April, 2013

in the Seminar Room, First Floor, Library Building

on

‘Fire by Night, Cloud by Day: 

Indians, South Africans and Trinidadians remember postwar, Cold War London’

by

Prof. Susan Pennybacker,

University of North Carolina, USA

Abstract:

How did the presence of activists, visitors, refugees and exiles from many regions of the former British Empire, influence metropolitan political culture in the postwar era? This presentation explores the lives of some of the many individuals from India, South Africa and Trinidad, who contributed to new political outlooks and sensibilities in the age of Partition, anti-Apartheid, national independence, and the onset of the Cold War. It draws upon oral history interviews and archival work to explore their contributions to political culture in the years between 1945 and 1989, when Britain offered refuge and support in deeply contradictory ways. Surveillance and discrimination persisted alongside opportunity and political voice.

This study seeks to address the larger question of what the British imaginary meant and means for those who passed time in London after the War. Did their visions of social transformation come to fruition as they had hoped? How did some part of life spent in London mark them, and what has been their imprint upon contemporary “multiracial” and “multicultural” Britain? Historians have long dwelt upon the global legacies of British imperial rule. What are the legacies of the post-independence circulation of people and ideas? There was a vast network of transnational movement amongst and between former imperial territories, now in possession of new freedoms or engaged in the struggles to acquire them. As a historian reporting on a book-in-progress, the speaker hopes that those with their own narratives may come forth and join the seminar.

Speaker:

Susan Pennybacker is Chalmers W. Poston Distinguished Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Her research interests involve issues related to political culture of modern Britain and the former British Empire. She is the author of “Anti-apartheid exile: South African Jewish activists in Britain, 1948–1949” in Carol S. Gould, Simone Gigliotti and Jacob Golomb (eds.), Festschrift for Berel Lang (2013), “Empire and its Discontents: Burton in Retrospect” review forum, Victorian Studies (Spring 2012), “Afterword” in Robbie Aitken and Eve Rosenhaft (eds.), Africa in Europe: Studies in Transnational Practice in the Long 20th Century  (2012), From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (2009), A Vision for London, 1889–1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the London County Council Experiment (2009) among others. During 2012-2013 she has been a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.

All are welcome.

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