ABSTRACT
A striking feature about the 'end of empire' was the fact that, in metropolitan Britain, it was a history that remained largely invisible to the naked eye. In contrast to the colonial empires of Germany, France and Portugal, in which military failures loomed large in their defeat, the ultimate acts in the demise of Britain's empire only rarely occurred in great set-piece confrontations. The speed of the process of decolonisation, and the seemingly unreal, abstract images by which the majority of domestic Britons came to think of it, made the whole thing rather mysterious. Decolonisation essentially remained invisible, or appeared to be an abstract phenomenon about faraway places, race was becoming all too visible and, in unforeseen ways, a matter of locality. John Berger anticipated, perhaps, current theorisations of visual culture. Yet the category of 'visual culture', notwithstanding the fruitful work it has done, may prove in the future to be too academic, too restrictive.
