Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State

Series Preface

Addressing urgent questions about how to make a just and sustainable world, the Fireworks series throws a new light on contemporary movements, crises and challenges. Each book is written to extend the popular imagination and unmake dominant framings of key issues.

Launched in 2020, the series offers guides to matters of social equity, justice and environmental sustainability. FireWorks books provide short, accessible and authoritative commentaries that illuminate underground political currents or marginalised voices, and highlight political thought and writing that exists substantially in languages other than English. Their authors seek to ignite key debates for twenty-first-century politics, economics and society.

FireWorks books do not assume specialist knowledge, but offer up-to-date and well-researched overviews for a wide range of politically aware readers. They provide an opportunity to go deeper into a subject than is possible in current news and online media, but are still short enough to be read in a few hours.

In these fast-changing times, these books provide snappy and thought-provoking interventions on complex political issues. As times get dark, FireWorks offer a flash of light to reveal the broader social landscape and economic structures that form our political moment.

Preface

This book is the product of a deep sense that we cannot and do not want to make sense of the world alone. In our individual academic projects, we consider state racism from the perspectives of the disciplines we work in: law, anthropology, geography, international relations, sociology, cultural studies and literature. In our political organising, we try to push back against the state, to imagine new horizons of possibility outside of its logic, and to form bonds of solidarity capable of challenging its power. In collaborating on this book, we sought to create a space apart from the pressures of academic research and without the urgency of activism; a space to think, together, about the changing face of racism in Britain.

As we were working on the book, friends and colleagues often asked how, as a group of eight, we were writing together. More than once we were asked what we were up to. Was this some strange new cult? Who was ventriloquising who? The actuality was less dramatic. Rather than divide into smaller groups which would each produce a chapter, we opted for an anarchic mix of collective thinking, noisy and very funny discussion, silent writing and remote editing. We usually met for a few hours in one of our offices (or via video link during the Covid-19 lockdown), with some questions in mind, usually generated from an initial exchange of gossip or fury. As our discussions evolved, someone would map the conversation on a whiteboard or flipchart paper, tracing the connections and keeping track of key points. Realising we were running out of time, we would wind down the discussion to write, separately, in silence (exam conditions!) for an hour or so. We would then collate the pages and read through each other’s work. The more we worked like this, the more synergy our writing took on.

Our aim was that when we read the final product, we would no longer be able to recall who had written what. In a landscape of personal brands and an academic culture that values celebrity over collaboration, working against the imperative to be a distinct, singular voice offered us a different approach to the challenge of writing. Collaboration also helped us to cope with the dizzying instability of life in contemporary Britain. We wrote the book between March 2019 and July 2020, during which time the mood music of authoritarian nationalism grew louder and louder. Meeting in person was a way to listen more closely to that music, to try to distil the relationship between what was being said and what was being done by the state, and to examine the cacophony of timeline media by placing it at a remove, if only for a few hours. Critical inquiry was a kind of group therapy, as the final throes of Theresa May’s short, disastrous premiership gave way to Johnsonism.

The book’s title, Empire’s Endgame, reflects our starting point. This project began life as an homage to an earlier collectively authored book, The Empire Strikes Back, published in 1982 by a group at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. We wanted to explore what a collective project to analyse and dismantle state racism might look like in our differently troubled and troublesome time. One parallel has been the dominance of the fantasy blockbuster in our collective cinematic imagination, something Greta Thunberg has decried, with some accuracy, by saying:

How can we tackle climate change if the adults are obsessed over a children’s movie series based on Legos?1

And so the ‘Endgame’ in our title is less a clever reference to the Samuel Beckett play and more a reference to the Avengers film. Avengers: Endgame is, infamously, the much marketed crescendo of a series of films depicting the Marvel universe. Through the second decade of the twenty-first century, an extensive series of Marvel superhero movies – plus a smaller parallel DC universe and a resurrection of the Star Wars series – dominated English-language cinema culture. As the world became increasingly chaotic, with an end to any pretence that there existed a political class fit to address the urgent and deadly challenges of forced migration, internal war and climate catastrophe, the displacement and spectacularisation of collective fears into a neo-mythic world of superheroes felt both symptomatic and all too understandable. Yet, despite the will to distraction, the endgame analysis of Marvel also echoed our own. In both of our accounts, and in the face of violence and climate disaster, something cataclysmic seemed to be on its way. Underneath all the bravado and show of the immensely powerful, there was weakness and the threat of imminent obsolescence. For all the fanfares of a remade authoritarian nationalism, all the buffoonish showing off and refashioned fantasies of omniscience, the period we examine is one of imperial decline.

The ascendancy of authoritarian nationalism that we trace here – however triumphant the national mood music – only makes sense through the lens of decline. We are familiar with the many premature announcements of end-times, and laughed about this often in our time together, but remain convinced that we are witnessing, at last and with so many casualties, the endgame of one imperial phase. Of course, and again learning from Marvel, we are also aware that the endgame itself can take a long time to play out.

Nevertheless, and in the spirit of trying to think historically about an all too troubling present, what we present here is a peculiarly British experience of endings. There are, no doubt, global parallels. Clearly there are other buffoons, although refracted through the class performances of other cultures. There are other places where the state remakes itself by rendering populations unintelligible or disentitled. Other forms of almost similar (but not quite) collapse of our planet on fire. At the same time, what we describe in the following chapters should be understood as the last gasp of one imperial formation, with all the excess, irrationality and clapped-out posturing of a former power’s demise. We started out hoping that this endgame might, eventually, open the possibility of something better. Now, as we complete our work, it looks as if a lot more of us might have to die first.

Another impetus for this work was our collective desire to extricate ourselves from the relentless immediacy of the internet, with far too much political energy taken up in digesting, decrying and responding to non-debate via social media. Working together was also a way of quietening that noise and pausing to reassess what we felt the noise could tell us about the larger political landscape, with all of its dangers and possibilities.

We’re not immune to the confected dramas of social and timeline media; indeed, many of our conversations began with one of us enraged at the latest scandal dividing anti-racist Twitter. But gathering together in person to think, write and plot together offered some respite from the atomising effects of digital life. Taking time to write sometimes felt like an indulgence, given the scale of our political and ecological crises. But while none of us believe writing or thinking is any substitute for political action, this project has offered us some sustenance for the messy work of organising. We hope something here sustains you in taking action too.

Introduction: Racialised

Mythologies in Times of Neglect,

Cruelty and Expulsion

Living in a world long disfigured by the violent, world-making force of racism, we have no choice but to be anti-racist. However, to act effectively against racism, we need to be able to describe it, to keep up with its shifting forms. As Cedric Robinson puts it: ‘Race presents all the appearance of stability. History, however, compromises this fixity. Race is mercurial – deadly and slick.’1 Cultures and practices of racism are rooted (and routed) in empire and yet they are constantly shifting in form and function. Racism is historically specific. We therefore need to ask how racial meanings and hierarchies are made and remade in our times. This book is our attempt to describe how racism has been working its deadly magic in contemporary Britain over the last few years. Because we view racism as historically specific and messy, we have found it necessary to map some of the complex relations between empire, racist culture, state practices and political economy. This means connecting the most overt manifestations of racist culture – the name calling, the racist street violence, the zealous anti-immigrant politics – to the shifting practices of a security-oriented state seeking legitimacy in times of unbearable economic uncertainty.

Britain is not a happy place. The market-oriented prosperity promised by Thatcherism and New Labour has proved for many to be hollow. While some aspects of the post-war consensus remain influential and continue to be circulated as the underlying common sense of UK political life, in reality the NHS and council homes that defined the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s are being privatised and stripped to the bone, accelerating the crises in housing, health and social care. The austerity imposed on other parts of the welfare state which followed the 2008 financial crisis has brought increased hardship and frustration, through both a lack of services and cuts to public sector jobs. On top of this, a deregulated labour market, zero-hour contracts and the gig economy mean that work, if you can get it, is precarious and low paid. In this context, reactionary nationalism is mobilised for political gain, and migrants, whether constructed as workers or scroungers, documented or illegal, have shouldered much of the blame for finance capitalism’s fiscal calamities. A nostalgia for empire and the euphoria of world war victory has displaced demands for a return to post-war welfarism.2 The crisis of legitimacy for governments that cannot provide the jobs and prosperity promised by market-led growth has been partially reconciled by new covenants, promises to protect the nation from violent crime, terrorism and immigrants.

In the following chapters we trace how shifting ideological repertoires of race and nation legitimate new forms of state power and practice in the context of this ‘organised abandonment’.3 Many of the questions which frame this book take the earlier work of cultural studies as their prompt and guide – particularly that of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and others working at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham.4 We are interested in how crises of political legitimacy are articulated in relation to themes of race, cultural difference, law and order, militarism, nationalism, gender, sexuality and the family – often expressed in profoundly visceral and violent registers. We recognise that shifts in economic relations fundamentally shape political, ideological and cultural formations, and that crises of capital accumulation and profitability organise the more immediate terrain of political struggle. However we refuse the class reductionism which imagines that political interventions need focus only on the ‘economic base’, and all else will follow, and we reject the view that racism is a straightforward effect of economic crisis.5

We are interested in the political practices and logics that work through race, that signal race explicitly or implicitly, and that make and remake race in the present. This is why we ask throughout the book: what kind of state do we have now, and how is its programme of cruelty, neglect and expulsion justified ideologically? When trying to understand race and racism in Britain today, we need to analyse how racist state practices – immigration controls, counter-terror measures and criminal justice policies – seem to address people’s real problems and lived experiences. In other words, we need to think about the relationship between state racism and the making of political subjectivities. This project of making and remaking political subjectivities cannot be understood without attention to the place of (post)imperial racial anxieties and the sense of pervasive loss that animates political imaginations.

Our argument is not simply that racism tricks people into blaming their economic hardship on racialised outsiders. This is true but it is too flat. Beyond ‘false consciousness’ arguments, we are interested in the kinds of affects and political subjectivities that are brought into being through practices and representations of state neglect, cruelty and racialised expulsion. These practices do not only make racists, they also produce political subjects who long for authority, closure and certainty in ways which exceed the racial and implicate all of us. In our view, these desires and frustrations are inevitably shaped by the digital character of so much political and social life today, and thus our analysis of racism is also about how people communicate and imagine collectively on social media.

Mapping this terrain is far from straightforward. Racialised crises reveal the fault lines of a wider destabilisation, and thus the difficulty of even describing racism is a measure of our collective confusion in these unsettling times. That said, there is value in describing and drawing connections, even as the ground moves beneath our feet. For us, the return (if it ever went away) of race as an organising term in a time of crisis is the opening question not the closing answer. In part, this stems from a shared belief that defeating the dehumanising violence of racism requires an agility and openness to surprise, because the one thing our enemies do well, do better than us, is to retain the element of surprise. The weary cynicism of anti-racists who proclaim that they have seen it all before, that racism is endless, timeless and monolithic, prevents us from seeing how things change. The point is not to say how things are always the same but to understand how we and ours continue to be shafted in spite of other changes. Things might still be awful but they are not awful in the same way.

This, then, is where we begin – with the shared belief that it is not so easy to understand the times we are in. In particular, strange and multiple remakings of racism have taken on a heightened significance, but connecting these eruptions to economic and national crisis is no simple task. From this difficult starting point, this book seeks to deepen our understanding of racism in Britain, beyond Tory-bashing and outside the restrictive tempos set by public scandal and parliamentary squabbling.

Hopefully this book also offers some tools for moving beyond accounts of racism that become stuck documenting structural inequalities or interpersonal humiliations, realities which should not be taken lightly, but which cannot, on their own, offer us a way out analytically. We hope the book provides some useful tools for thinking the problem differently, for understanding the present moment in new ways and, ultimately and most importantly, for building analytical connections that can inform political struggle. Before we begin our analysis of racialised folk devils in