ABSTRACT
Wendy Webster combines all these emphases, in looking at how British cinema depicted the end and aftermaths of empire, and how sexual imaginings and fears were at the heart of this. Bill Schwarz’s work also explores what he calls a ‘re-racialization’ of England in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but his focus is on the impact of decolonization on the metropolis and, in reviewing the history of white settler communities in empire, he is concerned to trace a range of connections between empire and ‘home.’ In this chapter, he examines imagery in the mainstream British media to explore the complexity and ambivalence of the theme of a domestic sanctuary, threatened with violation, and its interplay of ideas of racial and gender differences. He argues that while both representations of colonial wars and immigration showed black men invading white territory, this was a territory that was characteristically defined in terms of home and family.
