Rethinking Britain

Abstract

The fever of colonisation over with, though not quite so, war-ripped Britain became a magnet for immigrants in dire need of bettering their lot, thus «reversing the journey made by generations of British emigrants», all the while redefining the sense of Britishness the Britons take pride in. The flow turned from the margins and returned to the metropolitan center in a reverse colonization, making the global local, which gave birth to multiculturalist Britain. Anecdotally, at the very time Britain wanted to rid itself of its colonies, we, the colonised, followed them home to London, a city paved in gold. «We just came to check out whether that was so or not», Hall says. While colonial encounters represented a contest zone shaping to significant lengths and breadths the inimical perception and conception of an/other, immigration afforded an amphibian terrain, a contact zone very much like a cauldron where the past and the present merge, though not so immaculately as misconceptions still persist.