University of Leipzig

Is it cos they is black?

British society and its colonial immigrants
in the TV series "The Kumars at No. 42" and "Ali G"

by

David Glowsky

Content

Introduction 2

Ethnic minorities in Great Britain since 1945 2

Reasons for immigration to Great Britain since 1945 2

British immigration policy since 1945 4

Nationalist sentiment and racism in Great Britain today 6

"The Kumars at No. 42" and "Ali G" 9

The Kumars at No. 42 10

Ali G 14

Conclusion 18

Bibliography 20

Primary Sources 20

Secondary Sources 20

Introduction

British society has undergone a considerable change of its composition in the past fifty years. Unprecedented numbers of immigrants came to Great Britain after World War II. The traditional populatio n, which had been rather homogeneous until then, was confronted with foreign-looking people who came from former colonies and whose identities seemed anything but British. Since then, the proportion of non-white Britons of the population has risen steadily. Their influx was increasingly made difficult, when the voices against such immigrants grew stronger. The national self-image of a white British nation became more and more problematic. At present British self-understanding is undergoing a shift away from the traditional viewpoint to an awareness of changed circumstances. In this setting the essay at hand will investigate signs of that shift in two British TV series formats, namely “The Kumars at No. 42” and “Ali G”. It will show how remaining tensions between the immigrant and the traditional population are being dealt with and how new ways of coexistence are negotiated. The main focus will be an analysis of strategies to break down old imperial structures and sublime ways to question British selfimages. Both TV series have their own ways of turning the imperial tables and presenting British society in a critical light. The essay is divided into two parts. In the first section, an overview of British immigration history since 1945, followed by a discussion of British national sentiment will be given. The second section analyses the strategies of the two series against this backdrop. Ethnic minorities in Great Britain since 1945 The impact of the two TV series dealt with in this essay cannot be understood without knowledge of the history of ethnic minorities in Britain since the end of World War II, as the themes dealt with in the series are closely interlinked with this episode of recent British history. This chapter will give an overview of selected aspects of this phenomenon. A first section will describe corner points of immigration politics and flows of colonial immigrants to Britain. The second part moves from this mainly historical view to a description of the deve lopment of national sentiment and racism.

Reasons for immigration to Great Britain since 1945

In the past fifty years, roughly counted, there has been a big change in the composition of the British population. Although the country has seen waves of immigration of different ethnic groups for centuries¹, a nation that understood itself as predominantly homogeneous developed within the past few centuries. The British nation was a “white nation”. Since the famine in Ireland in the 19th century there had been a considerable inflow of Irish to Britain, but except from that other immigrant groups were diminishingly small. In 1953 the non-white community in Britain was estimated to approximately 40,000 (Layton-Henry 1992: 10).

In the aftermath of World War II, however, this picture changes dramatically. A number of factors caused the migration of a relatively high number of colonial subjects to Britain. Already with the end of World War II workers from the West Indies who had been recruited to serve for the mother-country during the war and were intended to go back home after it, were reluctant to do so for several reasons (Layton-Henry 1992: 11). The government put a lot of energy into the attempt to repatriate them and indeed by the middle of 1947 the majority had left Britain (Spencer 1997). One of the major reasons for the relatively sudden commencement of colonial immigration was the changing relationship between the centre and periphery of the British Empire. The Empire dissolved into autonomous territories, whose migration policies could no longer be controlled from London. From the point of their independence, former colonies decided in their interest; India and Pakistan for example issued passports to their citizens more freely than this had formerly been possible under the influence of the Colonial Office (Spencer 1997: 22). At the same time the government was keen to attract labourers for the reconstruction of the country. Immigration from overseas was supposed to fill the heavy labour shortage, which had been caused by the war. At the beginning the main source of labour for post-war reconstruction was the whole European continent, amongst others Polish and Italians were attracted to work in Britain (Spencer 1997: 39). By 1947 the Colonial Office raised the point that the government should consider the possibility of recruiting British subjects from the Commonwealth. Furthermore, Governors or Officers Administering of West Indian Islands rejected the British policy to employ European workers. They pressed London to use their people for the reconstruction of the United Kingdom (ibid).

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1 Immigration to Great Britain is not a new phenomenon. Instead the flow of ethnic groups, which the present British population originates from, has a long history (Layton-Henry 1992: 3). Invaders like the Angles, Saxons, Normans have successively populated the country. This has to be borne in mind when talking about immigration to Britain – the population as it is composed today is the result of centuries of immigration.