Nadine El-Enany

(B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. In announcing itself as postcolonial through immigration and nationality laws passed in the 60s, 70s and 80s, Britain cut itself off symbolically and physically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. This imperial vanishing act cast Britain's colonial history into the shadows. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out. In fact, immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence. They obstruct the vast majority of racialised people from accessing colonial wealth amassed in the course of colonial conquest. Regardless of what the law, media and political discourse dictate, people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

Law, Race and Empire

Bordering Britain

ordering Britain

Jenny Edkins

Dan Bulley

On the 14th June 2017, a fire engulfed a tower block in West London, seventy-two people lost their lives and hundreds of others were left displaced and traumatised. The Grenfell Tower fire is the epicentre of a long history of violence enacted by government and corporations. On its second anniversary activists, artists and academics come together to respond, remember and recover the disaster.The Grenfell Tower fire illustrates Britain's symbolic order; the continued logic of colonialism, the disposability of working class lives, the marketisation of social provision and global austerity politics, and the negligence and malfeasance of multinational contractors. Exploring these topics and more, the contributors construct critical analysis from legal, cultural, media, community and government responses to the fire, asking whether, without remedy for multifaceted power and violence, we will ever really be 'after' Grenfell?With poetry by Ben Okri and Tony Walsh, and photographs by Parveen Ali, Sam Boal and Yolanthe Fawehinmi.With contributions from Phil Scraton, Daniel Renwick, Nadine El-Enany, Sarah Keenan, Gracie Mae Bradley and The Radical Housing Network.

Violence, Resistance and Response

After Grenfell

B)ordering Britain provides a race critical reading of British immigration and asylum law, arguing that it must be understood in the context of Britain's colonial identity and history. Britain's relationship and fluctuating commitment to its empire was a major driving force behind legal change in the field of immigration and asylum. Immigration law serves to cordon off Britain, the place where colonial spoils are located, from the historically dispossessed. Law is also the primary means of recognition for those seeking legal status. (B)ordering Britain thus offers a critique of law and the politics of recognition in the context migration. It considers the lasting effects of Britain's colonial history, from its shaping of immigration and asylum law, to the impact on people seeking entry to Britain and on its fraught relationship with the European Union.

(B)ordering Britain

Kerem Nisancioglu

Luke de Noronha

Sita Balani

Kojo Koram

El-Enany El-Enany

Dalia Gebrial

Gargi Bhattacharyya

Adam Elliott-Cooper

We are in a moment of profound overlapping crises. The landscape of politics and entitlement is being rapidly and unpredictably remade. As movements against colonial legacies and state violence coincide with the rise of new authoritarian regimes, it is the analytical lens of racism, and the politics of race, that offers the sharpest focus.In Empire's Endgame, eight leading scholars make a powerful collective intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in the British context. While the 'Hostile Environment' policy and Brexit Referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual attitudes and behaviours. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors of Empire's Endgame trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state.Engaging with contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, media, the state and criminalisation, and a vision of a political infrastructure that might include rather than expel in the face of crisis.

Racism and the British State

Empire's Endgame

Nadine El-Enany

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