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Caribbean migrants and the negotiation of pigmentocracy in Britain, 1948-78

Event information>

Dates

This is a past event
Time
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Location

Hybrid | Online-via Zoom & IHR Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Institute

Institute of Historical Research

Event type

Seminar

Event series

Britain at Home and Abroad since 1800

Speakers

Olivia Wyatt (QMUL)

Contact

Email only

Under colonialism, hierarchies of skin shades were embedded into the fabrics of Caribbean societies to varying degrees. Within colonies such as Jamaica, the pigmentocracy had the potential to affect the social standing, job prospects, and educational opportunities of adults and children. The first decades of the postwar period witnessed an increase in migration from the Caribbean to Britain; however, many Commonwealth Citizens were disorientated by British society and its cultural practices. It has been argued that migrants were often lumped into the totalising category of ‘coloured’ within the majority-White country, regardless of their complexion, class, or heritage, but this paper will question that assumption. 

The paper explores the ways in which migrants negotiated the pigmentocracy in the absence of the institutions that had sustained it back home, amid decolonisation movements in which Caribbean pigmentocracies were also challenged and re-articulated. I examine the sites in which darker-skinned migrants manoeuvred the limited relationship between class and brownness to displace the pigmentocracy. However, I also investigate the spaces in which White British landlords, employers, and colleagues differentiated between migrants on the basis of their complexion, often in reference to racial hierarchies and their colonial imagination of ‘conquered’ territories. A closer investigation of these social interactions can revise prevailing arguments about ‘shade-blind racism’ and nuance histories of race and class in Britain, which often neglect or trivialise the role of complexion in permitting migrants access to ‘White’ private spaces. Rather than lose its relevance, the pigmentocracy was unstable in Britain because the significance of brownness fluctuated according to the social setting. The values of the pigmentocracy remained symbolically important to Black Britons not only because some migrants attempted to perpetrate a skin-distinction which had served them in the Caribbean, but because there were also spaces in which White Britons utilised these values to assess race. 

All welcome

- this seminar is free to attend, but booking is required.

This page was last updated on 6 January 2025