ABSTRACT
'In Malaya,' the Daily Mail rioted in 1953, 'three arid a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.' Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early post-war Britain, but the significance of immigration discourse in redefining the post-imperial British national community has been widely recognised. The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror was central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. Chris Waters argues that questions of race became central to questions of national belonging, and explores the race relations literature to review the ways in which the idea of a 'little England' was used against a black migrant 'other' who was identified as a 'dark stranger'.
