Contrasting Terms of Austerity & Abundance in Post-war Britain in the Book “Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions & Practices” by David C. Wall

October 10, 2021 by Essay Writer

Cao Mingmin (U1731120B)The chapter of Anxiety abroad: Austerity, abundance and race in post-war visual culture, from the book Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-70 was published in the end of 2015. Written by David C. Wall, the chapter employed a diverse collection of visual mediums in depicting contrasting terms of austerity and abundance in post-war Britain.

The author analysed four visual texts produced in the 1950s, which are the feature films Simba (dir. Brian Desmond Hurst, 1955) and Sapphire (dir. Basil Dearden, 1959), as well as John Bratby’s artwork Jean and Still Life in Front of Window (1954) and Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956). The creators of the mentioned texts employ visual strategies that challenges and contain post-war desire and denial, contributing to the discourses of empire, race, and nation in Britain.

The author argued that traces of anxiety and ambivalence termed as underlying tensions that associated with Britain’s imperial decline existed far before the emergence of popular culture that explicitly grappled with issues of decolonisation in the 1960s. These tensions can be found in the abundance experienced that are unavoidably connected to the empire from nineteenth century onwards. He thus intended to locate and discern them in the examples of high and mass culture to prove that even the most casual analyses of the cultural formations of the post-war period contains the omnipresence of empire within the social imaginary. Each text highlights the equivocal ways in which decolonisation weaves into British culture during the post-war period.

In Simba, the author analysed the film’s racial roles in which a relationship was established between the white Europeans who took on the paternalistic responsibility in intervening into the lives of the childlike Africans. Despite a different geographical backdrop, Simba was as if designed for a domestic British audience. It was a platform that illustrates compelling, and sometimes contradictory tensions often parallel to the situation at home. The film reinforced the assumed privileges of the Europeans when these assumptions were being questioned, coincidentally when consequences of decolonisation abroad and post-Windrush immigration became more apparent.

Known for his artwork depicting everyday mundanity of the British working class, Bratby was chosen to demonstrate the ambivalence and anxiety of post-war Britain. The presence of material abundance depicted in Jean and Still Life in Front of Window served as a vast contrast to the culture of austerity from which the artwork emerged. Bratby’s piece was a deliberate response to ‘the aftermath of war, and the climate of the aftermath of war, the austerities’ and reflected the contradiction of material over-abundance yet is devoid of comfort or joy.

The author examines Hamilton’s collage for it articulate the ambivalence towards anti-Americanism during the pursue for modernity within the context of post-imperial Britain. This widely held attitude was due to Britain’s declining status as a world power and the simultaneous rise in America’s international status. The collage’s bleakness and joylessness depicted the anxiety that for all its abundance of material goods, there were little sustenance. The author also drew from Hamilton’s artwork the underlying tensions present in its relationship to mainland Europe and the United States.

Dearden’s Sapphire was an attempt to deal with the issue of racism and prejudice. Set in cosmopolitan London, the film follows the efforts of two London detectives in unravelling the mystery behind the death of Sapphire who initially appeared to be white but was discovered to be black. While it claimed to be a progressive politics of racial tolerance and equality as the film, it struggles with deeper ontological issues in making sense of the categories of race in post-war Britain.

An Associate Professor of visual studies in the University of Utah, the author published other similar books such as The Politics and Poetics of Black Film and The Imperial Dialogics of Language, Race, with his research focusing on the examination of race in art, film and popular culture. In analysing Britain’s post-war culture, the author consulted sufficient and relevant evidences from reliable sources focusing on post-imperialism and decolonisation expressed through art, film and popular culture of the 1950s. The presented wealth of materials could be seen supporting or contrasting the argument made.

The author did hesitate in calling the four examples as ‘representative texts’ as this assumes their significance as compared to others. It falls on the critic in deciphering the meanings hidden within and dependent on the interpretation of each individual when interacting with these texts. The chapter shed light to the various distinct interpretations one can derive while analysing these visual texts. It offers a fresh perspective on Austerity Britain and how the existence of abundance was ever present yet unremarked in post-war visual culture.

References:

  1. Wall, David C. “Anxiety Abroad: Austerity, Abundance and Race in Post-war Visual Culture.” InCultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–70, edited by Craggs Ruth and Wintle Claire, 86-106. Manchester University Press, 2016.
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