Settler Colonial Structures of Domestication: British Home Children in Canada

There has been a surge of research on Home Children in the past several decades, as the phenomenon previously unknown to many came into the spotlight. However, much of the historical research has focused on either the psychological and physical impacts on the children at the hands of their new “families” (there were many reports of child abuse and neglect) or the ways they were saved from their poverty in Britain by being sent to the colonies. This article will put this existing historical research into conversation with theories of settler colonialism, considering Home Children as a tool of domestication for the social reproduction of Canadian white settler society, which was paired with the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands. This analysis stems from and is intertwined with personal reflections on my own family history as a white settler woman descending from a Home Child to explore the gendered labour of social reproduction as a crucial pillar in creating and maintaining settler colonial Canada. Following Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that settler colonialism is a distinct structure that uses domestication as one of its key tenets and relies on its “regenerative capacity”, this paper will explore how British Home Children were a key component of settler colonialism in Canada and how this history has manifested in the current gendered, racialized, and classed politics of “settling”.

Intersensorial translation of coughing-and-sneezing in an epidemic social context

The British Ministry of Health’s poster campaign Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases brought World War II to the British home front by making it personal and served as a visual call to arms for civilians. Although involving visual materials, the campaign provides a case for examining how posters engage people’s extra-visual senses in responding to this call. By using the concepts of intersensoriality and synaesthetic metaphor, we discuss the possibility of enhancing the audience experience of print posters by associating verbal and visual language with the rest of the senses. Premised on the assumption that it is possible to establish an interrelation between the senses related to sneezing, we argue that, once synchronized, all associated senses may increase the perception of propaganda experienced in the poster campaign.

‘But is it possible to live in such a motley setting?’ The modernist interior in Britain

This chapter details the encounters between modernist art and design and the British home. Using a range of case studies – in particular the Omega Workshops, the Isokon building in Hampstead and the activities of the Design Industries Association and Council for Art in Industry – it explores the reception of modernist home design and decoration in Britain in the decades before the Second World War. In particular, it discusses the rise of modernist design and decoration institutions, and charts their development and organisation.

The Civil Service and Government Structures

Theories of intergovernmental relations and public bureaucracy might predict that the civil service of the Scottish Government would be an independent political resource for the devolved system, exercised within a distinctive institutional pattern. Neither is quite the case, because both the officials and their structures derive from UK norms and models. Scottish civil servants are managerially part of the British Home Civil Service and the framework of appointment, pay, and relations with politicians is set from London. Government structures follow UK classification protocols based on funding and policy control, and do not offer novel hybrid models for conducting public business. Themes of integration, regionalization, and centralization have been evident, reflecting the weak policy and financial capacity of local government and the attraction of all-Scotland bodies in some functions. Lack of controversy, visibility, and distinctiveness on these issues is in itself a notable aspect of devolution. It proved an area of resilience in the 2014 independence referendum, when Scottish officials used UK protocols about exclusive loyalty to their own devolved ministers to resist accusations of partiality to either side.

The role of lawyers, judges, country experts and officials in British asylum and immigration law

This paper examines the work of lawyers, judges and country experts involved in asylum and migration litigation. I begin by analysing their work in the wider semi-autonomous asylum field within which a number of powerful institutions operate to shape policy, define the roles of key actors and determine access to legal redress/justice by asylum applicants and migrants. To understand the work of these three legal actors, I analyse four very different types of legal cases involving asylum, foreign adoption and migration law. An analysis of these cases helps to identify the constraints on effective litigation on behalf of refugees and migrants against the British Home Office and it illustrates the fact that it is Home Office policy, and the decisions taken by Home Office officials, that created the injustice for the individuals concerned by blurring the ‘bright line’ differentiating between the rights of nationals and those of ‘foreigners’.

INHABITING THE BRITISH COUNTRY HOUSE IN INDIA: THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS BY KIRAN DESAI

Kiran Desai’s critically acclaimed novel, The Inheritance of Loss, intertwines narratives of the lives of three characters: the judge, haunted by his past, is joined by his granddaughter Sai in his house in north-eastern India, while the son of his cook is working illegally in America. Published in 2006, the novel has mostly been analysed in the light of diaspora studies and praised for its author’s questioning of the effects of globalisation and immigration when leaving home. Yet what is also worth examining is the way in which some of the characters of the novel, including the judge, inhabit their chosen homes as foreigners or, to be more specific, as surrogate Britons in their country of origin, creating a separate community of anglophiles. The “solace of being a foreigner in [their] own country” (29) is but one of their rewards in their attempts at mimicking a British way of life. If the houses of the novel are set in independent India, this article questions the extent to which they could be read as counterparts to the British country house, relating them to values of continuity, tradition and Englishness. While anglophile characters take the British country house as model for their own Indian houses, their nostalgia is for a British home they never knew or owned. Their experiences of immigration can only lead them to create a pastiche of an English country house, which relies on a mythified vision of England. Their acceptance of English values and social hierarchy turns them into foreigners in their own country, seemingly blurring the definitions of “home” and “abroad”. Their reliance on the model of the British country house further points to the ways in which The Inheritance of Loss parodies the genre of the English manor house novel and the way it relies on colonialist norms.

Spells of belonging

Anna Tuckett’s piece on the paper trails left, created and curated by migrant streams crossing Europe raises questions on how social personhood is legally affirmed or undermined by legal paperwork. As is now a well aired fact, those UK citizens affected by the ‘hostile environment’ instituted by the British Home Office (HO) from 2012 onwards were disproportionately black and descended from former Caribbean colonies (Olusoga 2019). I consider my experience relating to immigration practices and assumptions to indicate aspects of this environment in the making. In 2004, I spent six months working for the civil service in the UK as a blandly labelled ‘presenting officer’. A presenting officer presented the Home Secretary’s case for refusing immigration and asylum claims that the applicant had appealed. In such cases, it was common strategy to draw attention to the lack of consistency, in terms of both narrative and between a person and their papers. Narrative consistency was required: the same story had to be told to the case officer on presenting a claim and in the courtroom to the adjudicator and in any and every opportunity to retell the tale the applicant had. Any inconsistency was taken as evidence of deceit. A person had to be able to document their birth, entries and exits to the UK, schooling, workplaces, income and family relationships. The requirements of consistency reified relationships that had documentary existence over those that did not. Lack of documents undermined a person’s ability to make their case.