ABSTRACT
In this article, I problematise a tendency to situate concerns for citizenship and belonging via what might be called ‘narratives of settlement’. In these narratives, the chronology of settlement begins with the visceral and institutional racism met by non-white immigrant peoples of the commonwealth post Second World War, and the tempo of settlement is marked by the problem of integrating into and within UK society. Such narratives occlude a broader and deeper contextualisation of struggles over citizenship within struggles over imperial belonging. To substantiate this critique, I examine various actors across the British empire who struggled over Englishness and Britishness – connected but discrete imperial cultures of belonging – during the Italy/Ethiopia war of 1935–1941. These actors variously problematised belonging to British empire via an ethical commitment to Ethiopia’s independence. Unlike narratives of settlement, the tempos and chronologies of these Ethiopianist narratives are fundamentally global-colonial in their framing of the problem of belonging in so far as their tempos are determined by the pursuit of African redemption and their chronologies are structured around the enslavement, colonisation and prospective liberation of African peoples. The benefit of undertaking an historical examination of the Italy/Ethiopia conflict is to bring into sharper relief struggles over imperial belonging wherein the moral and political compass of protagonists is oriented to resolutions that exceed an equitable national settlement.
