Regulating Interracialized Intimacies in 1950s–1960s Britain through Deportation and Immigration Policies

This chapter explores the role that immigration and deportation policies played in the regulation of interracialized intimacies in 1950s–1960s Britain. It draws from archival research into governmental and parliamentary debates of the time pivoting on the racial and societal tensions associated with the increasing arrivals into the metropole of racialized British subjects, of which the 1958 ‘race riots’ constituted a peak. The chapter argues that the containment of interracialized relationships in British society, and particularly those among Black men and White women, played a key role in how the government reacted to these tensions, specifically by deploying an array of racialized and gendered restrictions on the mobility and residence rights of Black British citizens.